The Postgraduate Certificate (PGCert) in Patient Safety and Quality Improvement is a part-time course for healthcare professionals, offered by the Department for Continuing Education in collaboration with the Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences. It can be completed in one year (though two years is possible), and consists of three modules, each a week long and taught in Oxford. The department provides online support and e-Library access for distance learning on either side of the Oxford-based weeks.

The course will appeal to doctors, nurses, allied health professionals, managers and others who have an interest in patient safety and quality improvement.

By taking the Postgraduate Certificate in Patient Safety and Quality Improvement, you will gain a deeper understanding of the factors influencing patient safety, learn how to investigate safety problems and how to make care safer. You will also learn about quality improvement approaches and how to better understand our complex healthcare systems so as to improve quality of care across multiple domains, such as outcomes, patient experience and timeliness. You will gain an understanding of:

• How to take a broad, systems view of the care system you want to understand and improve, including how to develop insight into technical, human and organisational dimensions of an improvement or safety challenge
• The underlying principles behind the sometimes-confusing array of quality improvement methods, each with their own advocates and jargon, learning how these methods relate to one another and how they fit into an overarching model of quality improvement
• How to measure different aspects of quality and care systems
• Why changes that initially succeed will, more often than not, degrade over time – and what works to prevent this so that initial changes are sustained and further improvement can be built upon them
• Approaches for understanding and improving safety in healthcare including human factors, design and ergonomics