PIPSQC is an informal, international collaborative of professionals who share a passion for patient safety and quality in paediatrics, and who interact together across organizational and geographic boundaries, to advance learning and improvements in these areas.

Objectives

1. To stimulate interaction among members and member institutions
2. To enable members to learn from one another through the sharing of issues, ideas, best practices lessons learned, problems and their solutions, research findings and other relevant aspects of mutual interest
3. To generate new knowledge and share learning that occurs in the collaborative with others
4. To generate tangible, measurable improvements in patient safety and quality improvement practices and patient outcomes

Activities

• Share tacit and explicit knowledge, insights, stories, experience, expertise, best practices, tools, and innovations
• Benchmark best practices across participating organizations to encourage performance improvement
• Map knowledge in paediatric patient safety and quality and identify gaps for further exploration
• Engage in collective reflection and problem solving
• Discuss new developments in patient safety and quality improvements
• Prepare articles for publication
• Build relationships within the collaborative
• ?Promote PIPSQC at every possible venue  

Membership

1. Committed practitioners in pediatric patient safety and quality improvement from:
   1. World class paediatric health care institutions; and,
   2. National paediatric patient safety and improvement associations.
2. Researchers and thought leaders in related areas of interest including safety culture, human factors engineering, measurement, etc.

Roles and Responsibilities

Members

• Interact with each other, sharing information, insights and ideas
• Participate in discussions
• Raise issues and advance ideas to enhance collaborative effectiveness
• Promote the collaborative as appropriate

Notes on “Communities of Practice”

• Keep things as simple and informal as possible to start; may become more sophisticated over time
• Members may come and go as interests and issues shift and evolve

References

1. Nickols, Fred. 2003. Communities of Practice: an Overview. Distance Consulting.
2. Wenger, Etienne. 2006. Communities of Practice: a Brief Introduction.