Institute for Healthcare Improvement: The Game Guide: Interactive Exercises for Trainers to Teach Quality Improvement in HIV Care

The New York State Department of Health AIDS Institute has taught providers and support staff about quality improvement since 1998 and has had the most success when the teaching has been interactive and when it has been fun. This is consistent with adult learning theory, which reminds us that adults learn by doing, not by merely listening.

The AIDS Institute has used number of games that do a good job of combining hands-on learning and a good time. Some of these are classics in the quality improvement field, some come from other disciplines and some we have made up ourselves to bring home an important point. The purpose of this guide is to make these games more broadly available by describing how they work and by clarifying the lessons they help to teach. We hope that you will use this guide as you work to involve more and more people in your program in the important, and ongoing, job of improving the quality of your services.

This Game Guide is organized around five “critical concepts” for quality improvement, that is, five ideas that are needed to understand and be comfortable applying in quality improvement work. These five concepts come from a series of articles that appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 1998, edited by Donald M. Berwick, M.D. and Thomas W. Nolan, Ph.D.

Games are organized under these 5 critical concepts:

Data and Measurement
Systems
Developing Changes
Testing and Making Changes
Cooperation

The Guide includes 20 different games each with detailed facilitator notes to set up the games, background information, and how to relate the lessons learned to HIV care.