Innovation in education for quality of care : a scoping review

Abstract

Background: Ensuring quality-of-care and promoting patient safety is a core competence that healthcare professionals are called to develop. Healthcare contexts are continuously changing advancing with social and technical innovations. The aim of this review is to identify innovative approaches in educational activities on quality of care, quality improvement and education about innovation for health professionals. Seeking evidence about educational strategies that are innovative or target innovation while addressing quality-of-care and quality improvement.

Methods: A scoping review has been conducted searching for papers published between January 2000 and September 2022. Data bases used were PubMed, APA PsycInfo, SCOPUS, Web of Science and CINAHL using the terms “quality improvement”, “quality of care”, “education”, “teaching”, “innovation” and “healthcare”. Papers included characterized the state of quality training and described interventions on quality education in undergraduate and postgraduate training of healthcare professionals.

Results: From the 2059 papers found, 11 were included in the study. Authors were mainly from USA and UK; most studies were about undergraduate training. Most interventions described the inclusion of Quality Improvement in the curricula. Papers were analyzed using a proposed innovation lens and classified accordingly. Seven papers were considered as Routine Innovations, one as (potentially) Disruptive, two as Radical and none as Architectural.

Conclusions: There is a paucity of evidence on innovative educational approaches or education about innovation for quality-of-care, with few studies targeting quality improvement only. Most of the interventions were considered routine innovation. There is an urgent need to include quality-of-care training in undergraduate curricula and doing so in innovative ways; a model to advance this is presented.