What faculty need to learn about improvement and how to teach it to others.

Quality improvement in health care, appropriately understood and applied, is one way to develop a sense of control over daily work. How can faculty members learn improvement methods, apply them to work and teach them to future health professionals? The paper outlines an improvement 'theory' and illustrates some ways it has been taught and learned by 10 interdisciplinary groups of faculty and students over the past 6 years. Eight domains constitute the content of improvement knowledge. They include: (1) health care as a system; (2) variation and measurement; (3) knowledge of the beneficiaries of health care services; (4) leading, following and making changes; (5) collaboration; (6) social context and accountability; (7) developing new locally useful knowledge; and (8) professional subject matter knowledge. Many lessons have been learned by 10 Local Interdisciplinary teams who have collaborated over the past 6 years including: (1) Systems knowledge is more effectively learned in the context of real work than in the classroom; (2) outcomes of care are beneficial sources of information to learn about the beneficiaries of care; and (3) the experience of collaboration with others-experts, colleagues, students and others-can be a learning tool in itself, especially in an inter-professional team. Involvement of students from multiple disciplines can enhance the impact of efforts to allocate resources in their organizations to building knowledge for improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]