A healthcare quality improvement collaborative brings together multiple organizations in an effort to improve processes of care for clients in a specific organizational setting (e.g., substance misuse) or a particular disease (e.g., diabetes or asthma). Coaching, a key QIC component, involves a coach working with change or implementation leaders to teach quality improvement skills and thus helping participants learn skills to effect change in the organization. Understanding coach effectiveness and how the """"""""teacher-student"""""""" relationship supports knowledge acquisition is a missing element in quality improvement research. In this study, we will adapt scales developed and validated in the field of educational research to assess individual learning and teaching styles and test their applicability in a quality improvement collaborative to identify learning styles of the implementation (i.e., change) leader and champion (i.e., executive sponsor) and teaching styles of the external change agent or """"""""coach"""""""". Study findings will lead to new potential prospective studies that match coaches and organizations or allow quality improvement or implementation science researchers to tailor the coaching intervention or the structure of a QI collaborative design based individual learning and teaching styles. Such studies would contribute to the fields of quality improvement and implementation research by exploring how change leader and executive sponsor learning styles and the teaching style of the coach improve expected patient and organizational outcomes.
A quality improvement collaborative, widely used in healthcare to implement changes designed to improve organizational processes impacting client outcomes, uses multiple approaches, including coaching, to teaching quality improvement to participants in efforts to enhance their learning and knowledge acquisition. Despite wide spread implementation, little is known about individual teaching and learning styles of the participants and how a particular style or a match between teaching and learning style influence quality improvement outcomes. The proposed research builds on educational research about student learning and faculty teaching styles to assess change leader and executive sponsor learning styles and coach teaching styles of NIATx200 participants and evaluate their influence on outcomes from this quality improvement collaborative study.
| Ford 2nd, James H; Robinson, James M; Wise, Meg E (2016) Adaptation of the Grasha Riechman Student Learning Style Survey and Teaching Style Inventory to assess individual teaching and learning styles in a quality improvement collaborative. BMC Med Educ 16:252 |
| Ford 2nd, James H (2016) Letter to the Editor on ""Implementation of Network for the Improvement of Addiction Treatment (NIATx) Processes in Substance Use Disorder Treatment Centers"". J Behav Health Serv Res 43:513-4 |
