The Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation is pleased to support two new innovative projects to improve health professions education:
Institute of Medicine: Global Forum on Innovation in Health Professional Education
The 2010 Lancet Commission report Health Professionals for a New Century: Transforming Education to Strengthen Health Systems in an Interdependent World shed light on the challenge shared by educational institutions in the U.S. and internationally: how to better align health professions education with contemporary health care needs.
The Institute of Medicine will convene a multi-national group of health professions leaders from academia, professional associations and governments to spur mutual learning and illuminate solutions for redesigning health professions education. Through a series of forums, these members will evaluate curriculum reforms and promising models for building leadership skills, teaching team-based competencies, and other innovative initiatives from around the world.
Read more about this grant.
Massachusetts General Hospital: Improving Quality and Safety for Diverse Populations
Language barriers between health care professionals and patients with limited English proficiency can hinder communication, leading to misdiagnosis and misunderstanding of treatment. To reduce these medical errors, Massachusetts General Hospital is developing a curriculum to train health professionals to deliver high-quality, safe and effective care to patients with limited English proficiency.
The web-based multidisciplinary curriculum will provide students with background on health care disparities and approaches to quality improvement and patient safety. Interactive case studies will teach students how to recognize signs of potential errors among limited English proficiency patients, and how to prevent those errors by working as a team with doctors, nurses and other health professionals, including interpreters.