Lurie Children's Offers Quality Improvement Training in Chicago
The Center for Quality & Safety at Lurie Children’s in Chicago is offering quality improvement training for healthcare professionals. While focused on medical care, the frameworks can be adapted by coaching practices to inform operations, track client outcomes, and strengthen proposals for partnerships with educational or healthcare organizations.
- The "Improvement Scholars" program at Lurie Children's is a six-month, interdisciplinary course that costs $2,500 and trains participants in quality improvement science through both didactic learning and hands-on projects. - Quality improvement frameworks from healthcare, such as the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle, can be adapted for coaching by creating a structured yet iterative process: planning an intervention, implementing it on a small scale, studying the outcome data, and acting on the results to refine the approach. - A tangible framework for applying data-driven methods in coaching is the COACH model, which stands for: Create a care plan, Observe the normal routine, Assume a coaching style, Connect tasks with vision and priorities, and Highlight effort with data. - Lurie Children's demonstrates its commitment to community and school partnerships through its Center for Childhood Resilience, which is expanding its Behavioral Health Team (BHT) model to all 515 Chicago Public Schools to better identify and support students with mental health needs. - An example of a targeted, neurodiversity-focused partnership is Lurie Children's "Team THRIVE" initiative, a research program with a community advisory board aimed at improving mental health outcomes for Black children with ADHD. - Lurie Children's collaborates directly with Chicago Public Schools through an Education Liaison program that helps patients transition back to school, provides information on educational rights, and assists in creating supportive educational plans. - The hospital's commitment to neurodiversity is also reflected in initiatives like its disability library at its Lincoln Park outpatient center, which features children's books with authentic representations of characters with disabilities. - To foster system-wide mental health support in schools, the Illinois State Board of Education and Lurie Children's have launched the Resilience-Supportive Schools Illinois (RSSI) initiative, a free and voluntary program providing tools and support for schools to develop resilience action plans.
