Home

Summary

Collaborative Education to Ensure Patient Safety

Continued

  1   2   Page 3   4   5  

B. Research and Development

Meeting participants urged the need to sponsor research and development in academic areas and practice management approaches to provide the tools and the knowledge base needed to embark intelligently on system design and implementation. Specific recommendations include:

1. There does not now exist a coherent and accepted core curriculum covering interdisciplinary collaborative team practice approaches.The Health Resources and Services Administration ( HRSA) is urged to allocate current funds associated with its various health professions training authorities to the development of such a curriculum. Such a curriculum would focus on patient safety and prevention of patient injuries. A true systems approach would need to be the base for such a curriculum, one that considers and examines the relative risks that exist for patients as they traverse the health care systems, especially through several interfaces.

2. The Veterans Administration (VA) provides a potential model for interdisciplinary team training and practice. The VA has developed successful clinical training initiatives that have brought trainees from multiple disciplines together into an inter-professional clinical practice arena. The VA model of interdisciplinary training could be made available to open practice sites through competitive grant awards.

3. DHHS should support research studies concerning the effects of VA interdisciplinary initiatives on individuals now in practice in other sites. It is hypothesized that clinicians who received training in the VA interdisciplinary model may have been able to influence the practice methods employed by other sites to which they moved. The extent of change they managed to induce would provide insights into the dissemination process required to change practices nationwide.

4. If the existing bodies that accredit health care institutions are to become engaged in the process to transform the industry, they will need new measures that reflect excellence in performance and that relate educational or health care practice approaches to patient safety. Substantial research is needed to establish the relationship between interdisciplinary team practice approaches, true systems operations, and ultimate measures of patient safety. Additional measurement research will be needed to enable accrediting bodies to assess performance.

5. HRSA and other agencies should consider funding Centers of Excellence in Interdisciplinary Team Training and Practice. Such centers could be funded through competitive grant authorities and provide loci for research and innovation that would be disseminated widely. In this connection, it is recommended that HRSA support research into and dissemination of innovative practice or training approaches that have already been supported either publicly or privately. The Internet can be used as the major dissemination method to publicize successful efforts that already exist, so as to capitalize on the many variations known to exist throughout the country.

6. HRSA and other Federal agencies should support development of private/public partnerships for establishment of interdisciplinary laboratories -"collaboratories" to promote programs in interdisciplinary education and practice focused on enhancement of patient safety. "Collaboratories" could serve as:
   Incubators for the development of learning initiatives;
   Developers of administrative service organizations to support such initiatives;
   Support for use and replication of established models (e.g., the Campbell collaborative model ²).

7. HRSA should develop/implement a national clinical practice awareness program demonstrating to practice sites the value of interdisciplinary practices for enhancement of patient safety. Use "best practices" research to derive alternative "how-to" models.

8. DHHS should require careful evaluation of all developmental initiatives aimed at innovative interdisciplinary programs or other initiatives seeking to improve patient safety.

9. Investigate the link between fatigue and patient safety and integrate such findings into best practice models of health care training and patient care.