EXTRA Curriculum

The new 14-month team-based EXTRA Fellowship builds on key curriculum elements that have been successful to date (individual skills and competencies in using research to lead improvement), with a sharper focus on effective techniques, leadership tactics, and organizational strategies to initiate and implement improvement initiatives by teams of interdisciplinary healthcare professionals and policy-makers in leadership positions.

The EXTRA curriculum is designed to link theory to practice, promote maximum interaction and participation, and translate the learning from the classroom into effective change-management Intervention Projects. The key content themes are: better capacity for extraction and use of evidence in context; improvement theory; leadership development; change management; and systems thinking.

The program has five components:

• A one-day orientation session.

• Away-from-home residency sessions (4 weeks in total over 14 months, spread over three residency sessions).

• Intervention Projects, supported by mentors and coaches, conducted at home organization(s).

• Completion of e-learning curriculum between residency sessions.

• Network building.

Through active organizational coaching and academic mentoring of the Intervention Project, guided reading, topical coursework consisting of case-based teaching methods at residency sessions, competency based self-directed e-learning modules, and mentored and active leadership development, EXTRA Fellows develop the following core set of competencies:

• Knowing where and how to search for appropriate evidence to support improvement initiatives.

• Acquiring skills in health-evidence literacy, health information literacy, research methods, change and improvement theory, and improvement evaluation, with a focus on measuring the effectiveness and efficiency of the chosen interventions.

• Employing leadership strategies to ensure successful execution of improvement initiatives, including effective communications and engagement with researchers, clinicians, board members, policymakers and consumers at suitable points along the change process.

• Designing tactical approaches, strategic levers and feasible plans for implementing changes, including: workflow mapping and simplification; six sigma and Lean processes; IHI methods; barriers and root cause analysis; and methods to test and scale up improvements.

• Knowing how to assemble data and information associated with public reporting of quality and performance initiatives.