What is CQuIPS?
The Centre for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety (CQuIPS) is a joint partnership between the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine and three of its major teaching hospitals, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, the Hospital for Sick Children (‘SickKids’) and Women’s College Hospital. The University constituted CQuIPS as an extra-departmental unit (‘EDU’), defined as a flexible, multidisciplinary entity organized around emerging areas of research and teaching that span traditional disciplines.
Education
Our programs
Not sure which program is right for you? Check our CQUIPS Program Comparison Chart.
Our educational programs emerged from our commitment to meet the various needs of an expanding group of learners both within and beyond Toronto. We have developed a one-day QI workshop for individuals who have little or no experience but a desire to gain exposure to QI. At the other end of the spectrum, CQuIPS partnered with the University of Toronto Institute for Health Policy, Management and Evaluation to launch the first Masters of Science (MSc) with a concentration in QIPS in Canada in response to a growing demand for advanced training to prepare future leaders and academic clinicians in QI. Most recently, we created the EQUIP (Excellence in Quality Improvement) academic certificate program to increase our national and international reach.
One of CQuIPS’ more innovative programs is the faculty-resident co-learning curriculum in QI that began as a pilot program in the Department of Medicine, but has since grown to over 35 training programs and over 200 participating residents across the Departments of Medicine, Paediatrics, Surgery and Laboratory Medicine & Pathobiology. The novel approach of bringing faculty and residents together to learn about QI addresses the dual goals of supporting resident QI project efforts while ensuring faculty develop the necessary skills to supervise and teach QI effectively. This program has garnered national and international interest.
The impact of our Centre’s research can be demonstrated in the many publications produced by our staff and core members, including a number in high impact journals such as JAMA, Academic Medicine, and BMJ Quality & Safety, covering a wide range of topics related to QI/PS. As shown in the figure above, the 529 papers published by staff and core members between Jan 2012 and July 2019 have been cited 10,698 times, for a group h-index of 45 (a few individual members have much higher h-indices), and a group i-10 index of 213, with an average of 20 citations per paper.
Organizational QI development
Our team works with health care organizations, including acute care hospitals, rehabilitation centres and ambulatory care clinics, to deliver QI training in an engaging and contextually relevant format to groups of clinical and non-clinical staff, with the aim of developing organizational capacity to successfully implement QI solutions.
The CQuIPS advantage
All workshop facilitators are University of Toronto faculty members and front-line clinicians actively involved in care delivery who have a wealth of experience leading QI initiatives in multiple care settings.
We offer a menu of topics that organizations can choose from (click here), and make every effort to incorporate examples relevant to your organization’s clinical areas and patient populations.
We offer the opportunity for organizational quality and safety leaders to co-design workshop content and use ongoing QI initaitives as examples for interactive learning exercises.
Beyond group training activities, our expert faculty can provide ongoing 1-on-1 consultation and support teams working on specific QI projects to advance quality and safety in high priority areas.
Our interactive group workshops include up-to-date content that draws upon contemporary examples and best practices to illustrate optimal ways of executing QI work.