We are a quality improvement collaborative. Much of our collective work has been focused on implementing SIMPL. SIMPL was the core of our initial work because “one cannot improve at scale what one cannot measure”¹, and if you want to improve surgery you need an operative performance assessment. Now that SIMPL has been widely implemented we are ready to use SIMPL data as an outcome measure for other, larger improvement efforts. In other words, we are now ready to more fully become the quality improvement collaborative we envisioned in the very beginning.

As we embark on that shared work it has become clear that our current name—the Procedural Learning and Safety Collaborative—needs to be updated. We must have a name that better communicates our values and our vision. To that end, we have opened a “Rename PLSC Competition”. We provide here the rules and other information to help you develop a winning name.

Competition Requirements

The winning name must:

1. Be easy to remember
2. If more than 2 words, have an acronym that is pronounceable as a word itself
3. Be broadly applicable to all of medical education, not just surgical training

Other criteria that would be nice but are not required are that the name:

4. Captures the collaborative nature of our work

Submissions

Please email your ideas to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. before midnight on June 7^th, 2020. The Procedural Learning and Safety Collaborative Steering Committee will judge the responses and pick a winner. It will be announced on our website and via email. The winner will receive a small token of our appreciation (PLSC swag and a $100 Amazon gift certificate).

Additional Information

Our Vision

Every physician who cares for a patient is competent.

Tag line

“Improving the quality of medical care by improving the quality of physician training”

Elevator pitch

Procedural Learning and Safety Collaborative (PLSC) is a non-profit educational quality improvement consortium focused on investigating and developing tools, curriculum, and policy to improve the training of physicians.  

Principles

In our work, we are guided by the following principles:

1. Our actions must advance our mission to improve the quality of surgical care by improving the quality of surgical education
2. High-quality evidence should inform our actions; where it is lacking, we should help develop it
3. We help develop evidence through our own cutting-edge research and by sharing our data and expertise
4. Our work must respect the limited time and resources available to faculty, trainees, and program administrators
5. The organization and our work must be managed responsibly so that it can be sustained for future surgeon
   
   
   
   Citations: 
   1. Bryk AS, Gomez LM, Grunow A, LeMahieu PG. Learning to Improve: How America’s Schools Can Get Better at Getting Better. Harvard Education Press; 2015.