The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) held its first Open School Chapter meeting at 6 pm on Wednesday, Jan. 28 in the Student Union Building’s Bergquist Lounge.
An IHI Open School Chapter is a face-to-face, interprofessional group. It brings students from different health professions programs together through a shared interest in learning about quality improvement and improving care for patients. IHI Open School Chapters exist on university campuses or in health care organizations, creating a forum for like-minded students and residents to interact and help each other gain skills to improve care.
The IHI chapter meeting reflects the new initiatives in the College of Health Sciences. The College is currently encouraging students to interact with peers and faculty from other disciplines as part of the curriculum in the college. Interprofessional courses and projects are interspersed throughout the college’s course offerings and the number of interprofessional encounters is expected to increase as more faculty develop interprofessional educational experiences and implement them as part of their courses.
The event was organized by Mark Siemon, assistant professor at the School of Nursing, to increase awareness of the IHI Open School Chapters, and to work with students on the development of an IHI Open School Chapter at Boise State University. The students who attended the meeting provided feedback on how to increase participation in future IHI Chapter events including: incentives to increase participation, incorporating into course curriculum, increasing marketing and promotion of the chapter, mass emails to students about future events, having more professors involved and talking about the IHI Chapter in classes, determine scope and target audience for the chapter, developing a Facebook page for the chapter to promote events, finding a student project lead, encouraging involvement through professional organizations, movie night showing a healthcare related film, and reaching out to District Health Departments. All of the students felt an IHI Chapter at Boise State University would provide more opportunities for students from different programs to learn about how to improve our current healthcare system using tools and resources developed by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.
Siemon has submitted an application to IHI for the creation of an Open School Chapter at Boise State. Siemon is collaborating with Jaime Sand and Sarah Toevs, faculty in the School of Allied Health Sciences Department of Community and Environmental Health, Max Veltman, assistant professor in the School of Nursing, and Jody Lester, associate professor and chair in the Department of Respiratory Care on the development of an interprofessional Finishing Foundations 400 course for Health Science majors. The course uses the IHI Open School courses in patient safety, improvement capability, quality, cost, and value, person- and family-centered care, triple aim for populations, and leadership, along with team based case studies to promote student learning about the triple aim of healthcare reform, which includes improving the patient experience of care, improving populations, and reducing the per capita cost of health care.