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View our Virtual tourCourses - January 2025
Level 1
Course details
Conestoga 101
CON0101
- Hours: 1
- Credits: 0
- Pre-Requisites:
- CoRequisites:
Project Management
MGMT8225
Project management has become central to the operations of any health care organization. This course focuses on the general principles of project management to deliver change to health care organization through successful project management. This course takes a holistic, integrated approach to managing projects, exploring project management methodologies, tools and techniques to successfully initiate, plan, and execute projects. Students will apply skills gathered from examining real-world cases into simulated projects done in the classroom.
- Hours: 56
- Credits: 4
- Pre-Requisites:
- CoRequisites:
Collaborative Practice for Health Care Quality
QUAL8470
Creating work environments that promote collaboration and open communication is essential to a culture of quality improvement and safety. In this course, students will learn how to communicate with clinical and non-clinical teams to collect data, propose interventions, and create buy-in to implement a program of quality improvement and safety management.
- Hours: 42
- Credits: 3
- Pre-Requisites:
- CoRequisites:
Quality Improvement in Health Care
QUAL8480
In this course, the students will build foundational knowledge of how healthcare individuals, organizations, and health systems create and implement strategies to improve care. This course will introduce concepts and methods for quality improvement in healthcare and will focus on the most common methods, tools and measurement techniques used to improve healthcare outcomes. Students will get fluency with a variety of quality improvement tools and approaches to change including the Model for Improvement, Lean and Six Sigma, as well as a variety of patient and client-led quality improvement approaches.
- Hours: 56
- Credits: 4
- Pre-Requisites:
- CoRequisites:
Applications of Lean in Quality Improvement and Safety Management
QUAL8490
Lean methodology has been widely adopted across healthcare to support quality improvement initiatives. In this course, the students will learn the foundations of lean-based concepts and methods for quality improvement in health care. By learning various methods and tools required to design, implement, and sustain Lean process improvements, the students will gain fluency in applying the fundamentals of Lean improvement to create efficiencies, eliminate change, and drive quality improvement and patient safety.
- Hours: 42
- Credits: 3
- Pre-Requisites:
- CoRequisites:
Human Factors in Quality Improvement and Patient Safety Management
QUAL8500
How a healthcare environment is structured influences thinking and decision-making processes. Human Factors, or a study of how our brain processes information and functions when affected by internal and external conditions, has a direct application to quality and safety management. This course will provide the students with a comprehensive working knowledge of Human Factors and how it impacts healthcare safety. By focusing on key concepts and frameworks in HF research and practice, students will learn to identify common circumstances in healthcare delivery that can lead to error and create mitigating interventions.
- Hours: 42
- Credits: 3
- Pre-Requisites:
- CoRequisites:
Incident Review Methods for Quality Improvement
QUAL8510
Critical incident review is a crucial component of creating quality improvement initiatives centred on patient safety. In this course, students will be introduced to methods which analyze patient safety, incident data, and patient care trends. Participants will identify areas of risk (including Near Misses and Never Again Events) by collaborating with interprofessional healthcare teams and other community partners to devise and implement impactful system improvements. The focus will be conducting thorough investigations into patient safety issues to evaluate and mitigate risks, ultimately leading to advancements in overall safety measures.
- Hours: 42
- Credits: 3
- Pre-Requisites:
- CoRequisites:
Health Care Operations
QUAL8520
Creating a robust understanding of healthcare operations is an essential skill set for a quality improvement specialist. In this course, the students will learn about healthcare operations and the management of health organizations, including micro- and macro-contexts of healthcare operations. By applying a systems thinking approach to healthcare operations management, the students will learn how to determine optimal methods to support quality improvement and patient safety.
- Hours: 42
- Credits: 3
- Pre-Requisites:
- CoRequisites:
Level 2
Course details
Career Management
CDEV8132
- Hours: 28
- Credits: 2
- Pre-Requisites:
- CoRequisites:
Leading and Managing Change
QUAL8530
Creating meaningful quality improvement often involves being able to lead and manage change. In this course, students will learn about different leadership frameworks that will allow them to lead and manage change from any position within the organization. By becoming effective leaders who foster leadership capacity in themselves, the students will learn to lead quality improvement change in a flexible, adaptive and responsive manner.
- Hours: 56
- Credits: 4
- Pre-Requisites:
- CoRequisites:
Health Law and Regulation in Quality Improvement
QUAL8540
In this course, the students will learn the legislation and regulations relevant to quality assurance and patient safety (e.g., the Public Hospital Act, controlled acts and delegation, reporting obligations, disclosure, consent and capacity, and others). Students will explore the role of regulatory colleges and accrediting bodies in ensuring quality care, the laws and regulations underpinning quality assurance, and the foundations of legal protection for quality assurance activities.
- Hours: 42
- Credits: 3
- Pre-Requisites:
- CoRequisites:
Risk Management
QUAL8550
Risk management is closely linked with quality improvement and patient safety. In this course, the students will learn to identify and assess clinical and non-clinical risks within a healthcare environment and triage risks. The students will learn common approaches to risk mitigation and learn to apply them to improve safety and reduce adverse events.
- Hours: 42
- Credits: 3
- Pre-Requisites:
- CoRequisites:
Data-Driven Quality Improvement
QUAL8560
Quality improvement is a data-driven process for managing quality improvement and safety management. By incorporating new evidence, quality improvement specialists can drive the changes to respond to new evidence. In this course, the students will learn how to select quality improvement measures, and how to collect, review and analyze data regularly to inform best practices.
- Hours: 42
- Credits: 3
- Pre-Requisites:
- CoRequisites:
Quality Improvement and Safety Capstone
QUAL8570
In this course, the students will design a quality improvement initiative based on a healthcare problem of their choosing. Working in groups, the students will employ the quality improvement methodologies learned in the program to plan, implement and evaluate their initiative.
- Hours: 84
- Credits: 6
- Pre-Requisites:
- CoRequisites:
Program outcomes
- Comply with the legal, ethical, and professional regulations within the health system to ensure quality in service delivery.
- Analyze laws, regulations, and health policies to determine their impact on decision-making in health organizations.
- Facilitate the development, implementation, and monitoring of quality improvement initiatives using critical thinking, data, and decision-making skills to support the strategic and operational goals in a healthcare environment.
- Manage human resources, human relations, organizational culture, environment, external relationships, and union relations in a multi-disciplinary health environment to achieve organizational goals and objectives.
- Implement a continuous improvement plan using operational planning, project management, quality management, and risk management to improve health quality and safety management in a healthcare environment.
- Develop and use strategies for ongoing professional development to enhance both personal and employee work performance.
- Develop and use culturally diverse and safe approaches for delivering health programs and services to individuals, groups, families, and communities.
- Communicate with multi-disciplinary clinical and non-clinical teams in various healthcare settings to guide activities related to the management of quality and safety.