Reports From the Field

Applying a Quality Improvement Framework to Operating Room Efficiency in an Academic-Practice Partnership

Journal of Clinical Outcomes Management. 2016 March;23(3)

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There is also value in adding real work experience to academics. The students were able to appreciate not only the concepts of QI but the actual challenges of implementing QI methodology in an institution where people had varying levels of buy-in. Quality improvement is about more than sitting at a whiteboard coming up with charts—it is about enacting actual change and understanding specific real-world situations. The hospital collaboration allowed the students to gain experience that is impossible to replicate in the classroom.

Limitations and Barriers

As noted in other academic-practice collaborations, the limitation of completing the project in one semester presents a barrier to collaboration; the working world does not operate on an academic timeline [14]. Students were limited to only testing one cycle of change. This part of the semester was disappointing as the students would have liked to implement multiple PDSA cycles. The OR managers faced barriers as well; they invested time in educating students who would soon move on, and would have to repeat the process with a new group of students. The department has continued on with this work, but losing the students who they oriented was not ideal.

The course instructors were flexible in allowing the project team to spend the majority of time breaking down the problem of OR block utilization into testable changes, which was the bulk of our work. However, the skill that the team was able to dedicate the least amount time to, testing and implementing change, is useful for the students to learn and beneficial for the organization. Moving forward, allowing teams to build on the previous semester’s work, and even implementing a student handoff, might be tried.

Future Directions

Although our intervention did not lead to sustained improvements in OR scheduling efficiency, our project demonstrates how QI tools can be taught and applied in an academic course to address a management problem. Research to specifically understand institutional benefits of academic-practice collaborations would be helpful in recruiting partners and furthering best practices for participants in these partnerships. Research is also needed to understand the impact of QI collaborative models such as the one described in this paper on improving interprofessional teamwork and communication skills, as called for by health care professional educators [16].

Corresponding author: Danielle O’Rourke-Suchoff, BA, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, Office of Student Affairs, 10900 Euclid Ave., Cleveland, OH 44106, dko@case.edu.

Financial disclosures: none.