A quality improvement project focused on assessment of risk level of outpatient psychiatry patients

Abstract

Since the implementation of the Clinical Learning Environment Review by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, there has been an emphasis on training residents in health care quality as well as patient safety. As such, psychiatry residency training programs have had to incorporate quality improvement (QI) projects into their training. We developed a QI curriculum, which not only included resident and faculty participation, but also encouraged other staff in our department to focus on patient safety as well as improving their performance and the quality of care provided to the patients.

In this poster, we present the development of our curriculum and will include a successful QI project to highlight this. This project focused on creating an algorithm to help assign patient risk level, which is based on evidence based risk factors. This project was created due to a survey conducted in our clinic which demonstrated that clinicians, and in residency training in particular, identifying and managing high risk patients can be anxiety provoking for trainees. We will present the specifics of this QI project, and additionally outline the steps that were taken to develop and integrate the QI project into clinical practice.

Objectives

• (1) Learn how to successfully incorporate a QI project and curriculum into a psychiatry residency training program.

• (2) Understand both resident and faculty perspectives on what resources facilitated participation in QI.

• (3) Present the development of a quality improvement project focused on risk assessment of outpatient psychiatric patients.

Disclosure of interest

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.