Postgraduate Certificate in Patient Safety and Quality Improvement
Gain the skills to make services safer, more reliable and better for patients
What will you learn?
'I now have more confidence to take these concepts and work on them to improve things for my team and patients'
Taught modules
The course comprises three taught modules. Two are core modules:
Quality Improvement Science and Systems Analysis
The third module is chosen from one of three optional modules:
Healthcare Innovation and Technology
Detailed descriptions of the topics covered in each module can be found in the individual module descriptions.
Learning outcomes
By taking the Postgraduate Certificate in Patient Safety and Quality Improvement, you will gain a deeper understanding of the factors influencing patient safety, learn how to investigate safety problems and how to make care safer. You will also learn about quality improvement approaches and how to better understand our complex healthcare systems, building your capacity to improve quality of care across multiple domains, such as outcomes, patient experience and timeliness.
Students completing the two core modules will gain the skills and knowledge to:
- Take a broad, systems view of the care system you want to understand and improve, including how to develop insight into technical, human and organisational dimensions of an improvement or safety challenge
- Choose the measures that matter across different domains of quality, and how to make measurement practical and meaningful
- Understand underlying principles behind the sometimes-confusing array of quality improvement methods, each with their own advocates and jargon, learning how these methods relate to one another and how they fit into an overarching model of quality improvement
- Understand why changes that initially succeed will, more often than not, degrade over time – and what works to prevent this so that initial changes are sustained and further improvement can be built upon them
- Apply the principles of human factors, system design and ergonomics to understand error in healthcare and design practices that maximise safety and reliability
Learning outcomes for the three optional modules (of which you choose one) are:
- Leadership and management in healthcare module: Understand principles of leading effectively and practices that foster a culture of effective teamwork in healthcare settings. Understand the organisational dynamics in healthcare, including financial flows and accountability systems, and what this means for exerting influence on other departments and on setting organisational priorities
- Healthcare innovation and technology module: Understand how to develop and implement innovations in healthcare including creating business plans and business cases for your own area of practice
- Becoming a clinical educator module: Develop further as a mentor and educator, including being an effective and inspiring supervisor, setting up and running courses, designing curricula and evaluating educational provision
See the individual module links for more detailed learning outcomes.
While each module its own clear focus, students will also find that capabilities in one area reinforce and amplify their effectiveness in other areas. For example, effective leadership and influencing skills are an important enabler of quality and safety initiatives, through mobilising organisational resources and aligning staff behind the goals of an improvement project.
Join our Oxford Open Grand Rounds, a series of virtual events featuring core concepts from the course. Open to all.
If you have questions, please email ssp@nds.ox.ac.uk.