The Open School recently did an informal survey of our learners, to help us plan new educational content this year. Overall, we had participation from 129 learners — a mix of health care students, professionals, and faculty.

We wanted to share some of the results with you, the Open School community. We’ll start with our question about which topics are increasingly important for health care professionals to study. We set this up as a ranking question, so that survey-takers couldn’t tell us that all the topics were very important (which we know they are!).

The results surprised us.

Patient safety came in first. Person- and family-centered care was runner up. Quality improvement came in third.

Here is a graph of the results:

In our internal quality improvement work, we make predictions before we run tests to see what we learn. In this case, our best guess was that quality improvement would be ranked first. That’s what we’re known for, after all. “Improvement” is in our name. And it represents the methods and tools we use to make care safer, lower-cost, and more patient-centered, for example. So we’d like to know from you — why do you think we got these results? If you took the survey, why did you give the answer you did? Please leave your thoughts in the comments. And look out for more results from our survey in future blog posts.