About the Center for Leadership and Improvement

Center for Leadership and Improvement

The mission of the Center for Leadership and Improvement is to foster the development of people who, in specific settings, will advance the measurement, organization and improvement of patient care quality, safety and value as part of the process of the ongoing reform of health care.

The Center is composed of four major interwoven themes:

1. Clinical Care Improvement Leadership Development—A focus on the knowledge and skill needed to appraise and assimilate scientific evidence, systematically evaluate particular contexts, lead the improvement of actual patient care and measurement of changed performance in organized settings.

2. Patient Safety Sciences—A focus on the knowledge and skill needed to make health care more reliable in real settings of care.

3. Health Professional Development—A focus on the knowledge and skill needed by health professionals to engage in and lead practice-based learning and improvement.

4. Quality Literature Program—A focus on the development and dissemination of the knowledge and skills needed to continuously improve the scholarly literature for the improvement of health care.

Together they will address the problems of the formation of health professionals, the contexts in which they learn and practice, and the outcomes experienced by patients—and will recognize the interconnections of the learning and patient care. Using performance measurement and tests of change, models of reflective practice will be developed and studied. As the Center adapts to the various opportunities in support of its mission, its priorities are certain to continue to change as it maintains a spirit of vitality and flexibility.

This work will be done with a wide variety of collaborators:  Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, Thayer School of Engineering, Tuck School of Business, regional and national consortia for specific clinical areas, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, the British Medical Journal publications, international consortia in Scandinavia such as Haukeland University Hospital, and the United Kingdom, and others.