Co-Learning Curriculum in Quality Improvement

Background:

Many residency programs are committed to teaching quality improvement (QI) to their trainees, but lack the faculty capacity to deliver a formal QI curriculum. The Faculty-Resident Co-Learning Curriculum in QI – created by Dr. Brian Wong, Dr. Jeannette Goguen and Dr. Kaveh Shojania – addressed this need by taking the innovative approach of teaching faculty and residents together. The dual goals were to teach residents, and to develop a cadre of expert faculty who could mentor QI projects and eventually teach QI. The idea was that faculty could attend the curriculum, observe how QI was being taught, receive coaching on mentoring and teaching QI, and then develop the necessary skills to become project mentors and teachers themselves. This led to the publication of "Faculty-Resident 'Co-learning': A Longitudinal Exploration of an Innovative Model for Faculty Development in Quality Improvement."

Based on positive participant feedback, the program saw rapid expansion from a pilot program for three subspecialty medicine programs in 2011-2012 to 15 subspecialty programs in 2015-2016 in the Department of Medicine, and six subspecialty programs in the Department of Pediatrics. As of the end of the 2025-2026 year, the curriculum has trained

• 1282 trainees
• 218 faculty members
• 33 allied health practitioners

...in the Department of Medicine alone!

The Curriculum has subsequently expanded within Temerty Faculty of Medicine from the Departments of Medicine and Paediatrics to Surgery, Ophthalmology, Laboratory Medicine & Pathobiology, Medical imaging, and Anaesthesia. The curriculum has also been adopted and implemented externally at:

• McMaster University,
• Western University,
• Queen's University,
• the Northern Ontario School of Medicine,
• the University of Manitoba,
• the University of Saskatchewan, and
• McGill University.

It has also been shared with all of the Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation programs across Canada. The emergence of these skilled QI teachers and mentors illustrates both the positive impact that the curriculum has had from a faculty development standpoint, and its long-term sustainability.

Many of the projects carried out as part of the co-learning curriculum have been extremely successful, and have been presented as abstracts at national and international meetings. Projects have also won conference awards at professional society meetings, the most notable being the Presidential Poster Competition Award Winner awarded to the residents in the endocrinology training program at the international Endocrine Society meeting in 2014. The co-learning curriculum was also awarded the 2016 University of Toronto Helen P. Batty Award For Excellence and Achievement in Faculty Development in the category of Innovation in Program Development and Design. This award speaks to the impact the program has had on faculty expertise in QI, not just on resident education.

Examples of projects that have emerged from program participation have included:

"Impact of Defaulting to Single-Lumen Peripherally Inserted Central Catheters on Patient Outcomes: An Interrupted Time Series Study"

• Division of Infectious Diseases

"Promoting Laboratory Resource Stewardship in Endocrinology: Reducing Unnecessary Free Thyroid Hormone Testing"

• Division of Endocrinology & Metabolism

Participating Programs (2025-2026):