ACGME Pursuing Excellence in Clinical Learning Environments Initiative Halfway Through Journey

The ACGME's Pursuing Excellence in Clinical Learning Environment initiative is wrapping up Year Two of its four-year journey to promote transformative improvement in the clinical learning environments of ACGME-accredited institutions. The first two Collaboratives of the initiative—Pathway Innovators and Pathway Leaders—are well underway. Teams of Pathway Innovators and Pathway Leaders both attended learning sessions last month to share their experiences and to continue to advance the projects they initiated at their institutions.

The Pathway Innovators met for their sixth Learning Session at Maine Medical Center in Portland and focused on maximizing shared learning with coordinated educational resources across health professions. Teams worked on developing a business case for an interprofessional clinical learning environment, discussed lessons learned from Maine Medical Center's iPace unit, a small interprofessional unit built from the ground up, and discussed coordinated strategies to evaluate the success of their work.

The Pathway Leaders Patient Safety Collaborative met for its second Learning Session at the ACGME offices in Chicago. The focus was engaging learners in patient safety event analyses. The teams are aiming to prepare all new learners at their institutions—whether five or 300—to practice safe patient care. Throughout the session, a core group of faculty members presented on topics including patient safety recognition and reporting, partnership with the patient safety office, culture of safety, and assessment.

Pursuing Excellence grew out of the ACGME's Clinical Learning Environment Review CLER) Program, which provides feedback to the nation's teaching hospitals, medical centers, health systems, and other clinical settings in the areas of patient safety, health care quality, care transitions, supervision, fatigue management (well-being), and professionalism.

The National Collaborative for Improving the Clinical Learning Environment (NCICLE), which also evolved out of the CLER Program, provides a forum for organizations committed to improving the educational experience and patient care outcomes within clinical learning environments. Recently, NCICLE developed a patient safety guide to prepare new clinicians, which has served as a reference for the Pursuing Excellence Patient Safety Collaborative.

The next step for Pursuing Excellence includes a request for proposals for the third Collaborative: Quality Improvement: Health Care Disparities. More details will be shared soon.