Teaching Quality Monitoring and Improvement in Schools of Social Work

canstockphoto9741388Courses on quality improvement are all over schools of nursing and medicine, but not my field, social work. Social work has continued to teach Program Evaluation to our masters students, even when so few of our graduates engage themselves in evaluation work. A few years ago, when I took a COA sponsored training on quality improvement, the trainer begged me to start teaching such a course.

Curricular changes come hard. People like to teach what they know and what they have prepared. Program evaluation may be here for a whole lot longer. But students should have a choice, I think, between a program eval course that they might not use much, or a quality improvement course that can prepare them for their roles as practitioners in agencies where active quality monitoring and improvement work is taking place.

My fear is that students would stay away from such courses, just as many practitioners strive to stay away from agency quality improvement work. I might have sold them short. My school of social work asked students to indicate from a list what courses they would take next year if registering then. For the first time, we placed a quality course name on the list, Quality Monitoring and Improvement. Nineteen students said they would take it. This means the course will get offered next Fall and I will teach it if we can get 12 or so students to sign up. Oh, the quality revolution is taking small steps. Small steps forward.


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