Quality Management Education – Message and Structure by Design

It has been a while since I have been in a blog writing mood.  Too many things happening.  Over the next short while I expect we will be much more active.  My most recent experience has been in teaching Quality Management to laboratorians of all professions as part of our university's Continuing Professional Development program

Our Virtual Classroom On-Line Education (VCOLE) course has been growing rapidly, to now almost double our enrolment of 2015.  This was in interesting lesson for me because I have always been resistant to allowing the course to get larger than 25 participants because I thought that too many people would create chaos in the classroom discussions.  I was convinced to be more open, and this year we had over 40 people, with physicians, technologists, quality managers, and administrators from multiple countries, and I was amazed at how well it worked.  Yes, there were some comments on overcrowded discussion sites, but we learned how to fix that, and it indeed worked excellently.  The participants really seemed to enjoy the course, and I know that their course colleagues will continue to be an important contact source for the participants as they develop their own contact networks.  It took a little bravery on my side, some risk/benefit analysis, and we came out with a success.  

In a similar vein, we were approached by an international health organization to see if we were interested in taking our course to South East Asia to deliver the course for an additional 26 Quality Managers and Laboratory Managers.  The challenge was that most of the group spoke little English and their internet access was usually unstable.  So with a little head scratching and some Deming-like Planning, we figured out to deliver the course not on-line, but on-site with the assist of some translators.  Rather than run the course for a continuous 21 weeks, as the current on-line course runs, we had to adapt the schedule to allow people to come together from across the country in a single place without disrupting their work.  (Also if I had decided to go to leave Canada for 21 weeks, I suspect my wife would have not been pleased).  So we settled on 1 week every six months, with continuity plans built in.  That meant maintaining the content of the on-line course, but adapting it to 3 very intensive weeks that included content, presentations, discussion, assignments, quizzes and a final exam.  

As with every plan it needed some tweaking along the way (call that Plan-Do-Study-Act) but it was amazing how well it came together.  The group stayed intact, their performance evolved to a very productive point, and their reviews at the end were in the range of 88% high level success.  

All it took was a little innovation, creativity, planning and impetus, but I suspect that you would all say that if every plan was put together with the same tools, the outcome would be fairly predictable.  

This has been a very busy time for all our mentors and staff, and for me.  And it took a lot of background administration to bring it all together but this is what I learned:

• Health organizations around the world are increasingly aware to the Costs associated with Poor Quality.
• The appetite for Quality Management training in the laboratory area continues to grow.
• People want the knowledge
• Their institutions want the knowledge
• The public demands the knowledge.
• More and more institutions are prepared to support their staff participating in courses that are designed to deliver. 
• Quality Management courses can and should be delivered in a variety of appropriate organizations and institutions, including universities.
• The impact of the Quality education impacts the people that take the course, their staff, their customers, their family members, their organizations and institutions and public health.
  
  
• The sharing of knowledge is profoundly positive and enriching on all sides. 

So now we have one course in Laboratory Quality Management that is ready to go in two formats, both on-line and on-site.  We know there is an audience and with two proven approaches, we are ready to continue on. 

Burn-out is NOT an option.

For more information visit: www.POLQM.ca

How to improve Education?

This post is a deviation from my usual.  It is written in response to Julia McIntosh who put forward a June question for ASQ Influential Voices.  Enjoy.

One of the advantages of participating in ASQ is that it crosses all the industry and professional borders.  In ASQ we have the opportunity to think about and apply our common interest of Quality in the broadest variety of subjects and situations.  I think we call that being engaged in the world around us.

My personal interest in Education is much more at the adult end of the scale and in particular continuing education in the arena of healthcare.  To be honest, my kids are well beyond school age, and when they were involved in school, my wife was much more engaged than me.  It would be far to say that I am not an expert or an authority in the area of Quality and primary and secondary Education.  But that does not mean that I am without opinion.

Being from Canada, I am pleased with our record of OECD performance, but also recognize that we too have a ways-to-go to improve our schools.  In comparison to the United States, I note that on the aggregate Canadian schools and students do better, but as an observer of successes of the American side of my family (my mother was from Kentucky) I think that it is probably still true that our education performance falls within a fairly narrow band, above the OECD average, while the US performance is much broader with more higher peaks and and unfortunately more lower valleys. 

OECD indicates some strong correlates with educational performance.  The ones that jump out in the most recent The OECD Programme For International Student Assessment (Pisa) 2009 [see: http://ourtimes.wordpress.com/2008/04/10/oecd-education-rankings/] at me are:

1.    Socioeconomic background of students and schools does appear to have a powerful influence on performance.

2.    Regardless of their own socio-economic background, students attending schools with a socio-economically advantaged intake tend to perform better than those attending schools with more disadvantaged peers.

3.    Across OECD countries, first-generation students – those who were born outside the country of assessment and who also have foreign-born parents – score, on average, 52 score points below students without an immigrant background

4.    Successful school systems – those that perform above average and show below-average socio-economic inequalities – provide all students, regardless of their socio-economic backgrounds, with similar opportunities to learn.

5.    Schools with better disciplinary climates, more positive behaviour among teachers and better teacher-student relations tend to achieve higher scores in reading.

And in my mind, most importantly…

6.    In all countries, students who enjoy reading the most perform significantly better than students who enjoy reading the least.

My first comment here is that from the OECD perspective, there is a lot of room for finger pointing at those who design and administer education, those who work within it and students and their families.  Put in the terms of ISO and Crosby, Education does not appear to be "meeting requirements" for many, or perhaps, hardly anyone.  

And maybe within that group there are some apathetic students and teachers and administrators who think that “good enough” is indeed good enough, but on first glance the issues seem to be a lot bigger and maybe a little less petty. 

The message to me is that large and powerful structural issues abound with socioeconomic statues, single parents, ESL, teacher engagement, and the student desire to read. 

And that is what concerns me.    The aforementioned are “big ticket items” that require and demand a lot of thought on how to address and focus on better schools, better teachers, more societal wealth stable families and more engaged students who love to read. 

These are not issues that Qualitologists are going to solve. 

These are big issues that must be addressed in the arena of engaged and honest brokers; debate devoid of party politics, and unions, and media bias.  These are not the sort of issues that go away tomorrow, or next month.  OECD measures time in decades and multiple decades, and that makes sense to me.  This is about LONG TERM commitment and resources and vision. This requires acknowledgement that “Baby Steps” are part of an important path forward, but certainly not  the goal. 

So upon reflection, maybe Michelle Rhee is part of the solution.  Maybe the first step has to be the understanding that “success” will ONLY be found when we understand acknowledge demand and accept that “Good Enough” will never be good enough.  

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