Using student-staff partnership to teach early years medical students about quality improvement: an evaluation

TL;DR

This study evaluates a student-staff partnership approach to teaching quality improvement skills to first-year medical students, finding it effective and engaging.

Contribution

The study introduces a student-staff partnership method aligned with the sustainable QI framework for teaching QI to early medical students.

Findings

Students focused on improving their university experience rather than clinical projects when applying QI.

Students often used everyday language to interpret QI terminology, revealing some misconceptions.

Students demonstrated understanding of QI as a process and applied it through worksheet tasks.

Abstract

Quality Improvement (QI) skills are recognized as a key outcome for medical students but are still rarely taught at the undergraduate level. Whilst there is evidence that preclinical students enjoy learning about QI, there is limited practical work exploring the best way to teach QI to this cohort. There are gaps in the literature around the evaluation of student-staff partnership approaches in the context of teaching QI, especially in line with the sustainable QI (susQI) framework. Our study evaluates a worksheet-based interactive session developed through student-staff partnership. The session was delivered to year one medical students in January 2024 at Imperial College School of Medicine (ICSM).

An inductive approach to thematic analysis was used to review worksheet content submitted by students during the teaching session. This method was employed to determine the session’s effectiveness and ascertain common themes of interest and application. 16 groups comprising 69 total students submitted worksheets for analysis.

Three themes were identified: Making QI personal: learners chose to focus on improving their university experience over clinical projects, which affected how they identified stakeholders and designed their QI interventions; Misinterpretation of technical language: learners used their everyday understanding of QI terminology in the worksheets, evidencing some misconceptions; Understanding QI as a process: learners reported understanding and engaging with QI as a process and set of skills. Overall, students demonstrated both their understanding and application of QI methodology through engagement with the worksheet-based tasks.

Student-staff partnership is a feasible tool to develop and deliver an engaging and effective teaching session on QI, in line with susQI principles, for students with limited clinical experience. Further evaluation and use of partnership approaches in developing QI teaching and curricula are welcome and will likely deliver positive outcomes for learners.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12909-025-06779-7.

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