Kolb Meets Quality: Applying Learning Theory to a Process Improvement and Safety Curriculum

The healthcare landscape is changing, and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education has recognized the importance of training our physician workforce to demonstrate competency in quality, safety, and process improvement. In the renewal of our quality improvement and patient safety curriculum, we set out to create an impactful and relevant course of study using adult learning theories as a scaffold to design the curriculum and inform our teaching methods. In this Perspective, we describe a few key learning theories and demonstrate how we have used them in the teaching of quality improvement and patient safety concepts. Our intent was to create a curriculum that could equip the next generation of physicians with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes they will need to adapt to the changes they face in practice and improve their work environments.