The purpose of the Faculty Leadership in Interprofessional Education for Patient Safety (FLIEPPS) grant is to improve patient safety by training faculty leaders in the best practices of interprofessional teaching and learning and patient safety.

An interprofessional team of educators is working to develop, pilot test, evaluate, and disseminate a curriculum for the collaborative education of health professionals in leadership and interprofessional teaching and learning to promote patient safety. Faculty who participate in planned curricular activities will develop the knowledge, skills, behaviors and attitudes that improve communications and teamwork among health professionals.

The specific aims of FLIEPPS are to:

• Develop a curriculum for training faculty in the skills of interprofessional leadership and teaching. Our intent is to increase participants’ knowledge and awareness of their own and others’ professional perspectives and to value the adoption of interprofessional approaches to issues of mutual concern. Topics to be covered include defining and delineating professional cultures and languages and examining effective approaches to cross-cultural communication. The pedagogical principles of experiential and reflective learning will be incorporated into all learning activities.



• Develop a curriculum designed to improve patient safety. The curriculum will increase participants’ knowledge of the terminology of patient safety (error, injury, adverse events, core and root problems, for example). In addition, it will train participants in best practices assessment methods for identifying opportunities for and barriers to improving patient safety, continuous quality improvement methods and principles of cooperative teamwork.



• Test the integration of the curriculum with a pilot workshop designed by and for medicine and nursing faculty in the first project year.



• Implement the integrated curricula in faculty development workshops in years 2 and 3.



• Evaluate the faculty development program. The outcomes to be tracked include the number and professional mix of faculty participants in the educational program, the interprofessional educational activities trainees subsequently engage in, the frequency of patient safety as content focus of those activities, and the influence of program graduates on interprofessional and patient safety improvement initiatives.



• Disseminate the curricula in year 3 nationally via program graduates and print and electronic materials.

FLIEPPS Web site: http://interprofessional.washington.edu/fliepps/

Funded by: http://www.hrsa.gov/