This week, Dr. Don Berwick answers a question from @Ensor_K submitted via Twitter: "How can students drive improvement, no matter what role they're in?"
Berwick, President Emeritus and Senior Fellow at IHI and Former Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, answers one of your questions every week in our new blog series, “Ask Berwick.” You can catch up on previous "Ask Berwick" Q&A's here.
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In his answer, Dr. Berwick talks about how any caregiver can drive improvement within their own role. In an article titled "Preparing Nurses for Participation in and Leadership of Continual Improvement" that Dr. Berwick wrote for the Journal of Nursing Education, he further discusses the challenge of constantly doing a job, and simultaneously improving that job.
"The capacity to 'make my job better' is not inborn. Nor is it usually taught in professional education. What professional education, including nursing education, has more reliably focused on is the content of the job—the subject-matter knowledge and cognitive and manipulative skills to care for patients in existing processes and institutions." You can read the full article here.
Make sure to check back next week, when Dr. Berwick answers a question from Cathy Ellis, PT, about how outcomes could change if US health care was provided seven days a week, and not “shut down” to a large extent on weekends.
