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Achieving Competence Today

Overview: Since 2005, University of Missouri Health Care (UMHC) has participated in the Achieving Competence Today (ACT) initiative, utilizing interprofessional teams of learners and health care workers to improve our health care system. Incorporating elements of a curriculum originally developed by Partnerships for Quality Education, the ACT program utilizes several principles of learning about improvement which have proven successful over the past several years:

• Interprofessional teams -In order to achieve superior health outcomes, a highly functioning interprofessional team is needed.
• Experiential learning - Health care workers learn best about improvement in the context of completing an improvement project.
• The collaborative learning model - Several half day intensive learning sessions are punctuated throughout the five month ACT curriculum, when all teams meet together for group learning. Between these sessions, individual teams meet weekly or biweekly to pursue their project work.
• Lifelong learning - By incorporation of health care workers, students, and residents into teams, all members of team learn together.

University of Missouri is one of seven academic health centers that received an additional two years of funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to develop this work into a team-based interprofessional experience in improvement.

Participants: During the 2008-2009 class, over forty health care workers and learners on six teams were involved with the improvement work of ACT. Participating institutions and groups included University of Missouri Health Care, University Hospitals and Clinics, the Sinclair School of Nursing, UMKC School of Pharmacy, and several departments within the School of Medicine (Internal Medicine, Family and Community Medicine, Child Health, Pathology, Psychiatry, Ob/Gyn, and the Med-Peds program).