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Master of Science in Patient Safety Leadership

The online MS in Patient Safety Leadership program delivers practical knowledge you can immediately apply to your work and features learning activities directly aligned to patient safety professions.

The program offers a comprehensive blend of online learning and practical application. The nine-course program includes a virtual residency and culminates with a capstone project you will develop in consultation with faculty mentors.

In this leadership program you will Heading link

  • Develop

    strategies for proposing and implementing process improvements within your healthcare organization

  • Review

    historical approaches to patient safety and quality care, and discover newer strategies for quality improvement and risk-reduction, including information systems applications

  • Learn

    principles to improve communications, techniques to resolve conflict, and guidelines to train teams

Program Progression Heading link

Program Progression Chart

The master’s degree program features a four-part progression:

  • Introduction to current literature and the Patient safety field
  • Immersion in theoretical and practical leadership scenarios
  • Application of your acquired knowledge
  • Contribution to the patient safety field – an original capstone project you will design, develop, and complete under the guidance of faculty mentors

Program study areas across the nine courses include: Heading link

  • Patient safety and quality care improvement
  • Error theory, systems thinking, risk assessment
  • Advanced communication strategies and collaboration
  • Organizational leadership, theory, culture, and change
  • Research methodologies and information technology
  • Applied leadership and decision-making, synthesis and integration of patient safety theory and practice
  • Legal, economic, accreditation, and regulatory issues
  • Impact of process improvement and behavior change
  • Effective leadership and the integration and application of program knowledge and skills

Onsite Residency

The on-site residency in Chicago offers three days of active, in-person, experiential learning, collaboration, and community-building with faculty and fellow students. You will apply the tools and principles learned in the first four courses and continue to build, with faculty support, your capstone project.

You will also be assigned a capstone mentor, along with a second reader, who as a committee will serve as your collaborators and assessors for your individual capstone throughout the remainder of the program.

Capstone Project

You will begin thinking actively about your capstone topic starting in the first course, and continue to work on it throughout the entire program. In consultation with UIC faculty, you can choose an integrative literature review or build an implementation or evaluation plan based on evidence in an area of interest to you.

Your capstone project will demonstrate effective leadership skills and an advanced level of understanding, synthesis and application of all content explored in the program. It not only represents the culmination of theoretical and practical skills learned, but also contributes to the advancement of the patient safety field. We hope that your project is implemented and your work shared via a conference poster/paper, meeting abstract or peer-reviewed journal article.