Master’s in Patient Safety and Healthcare Quality
Date duration
Application Date
19 Aug 2024 to 31 Jan 2025
Programme Period
11 Aug 2025 to 30 Apr 2027
Delivery mode
Program Description
A highly reliable healthcare system ensures care that is consistently of high quality and safety. In ensuring high reliability, the emphasis on patient safety and healthcare quality is critical. There is a rapidly emerging demand for patient safety and healthcare quality skill sets in healthcare nationally, regionally and globally. Through our programs, you can build healthcare leadership capability and capacity for high reliability systems and strong organizational culture for patient safety. This can help you to establish network of patient safety and healthcare quality professionals to foster sharing, engagement and collaboration.
The Master’s Degree in Patient Safety and Healthcare Quality program consists of 8 courses and a thesis course with a total of 40 academic units. You can also take some course courses as a standalone or stack four courses towards a Graduate Certificate in Patient Safety and Healthcare Quality
Do contact us at lifelonglearning@duke-nus.edu.sg for any enquiries.
| Course | Description |
| GMS5701 | Quality and Improvement Science |
| GMS5702 | Patient Experience & Engagement |
| GMS5703 | Clinical Governance and Risk Management |
| GMS5704 | Patient Safety Science & Leadership for High Reliability in Healthcare |
| GMS5721 | Psychological and Workplace Safety |
| GMS5722 | Design Thinking and Human Factors in Healthcare |
| GMS5711 | Organizational Effectiveness and Global Health Leadership for Patient Safety |
| GMS5712 | Education Approaches and Simulations in Patient Safety |
| GMS5749 | Thesis Course |
Core Courses
GMS5701
Quality and Improvement Science
Students will be introduced to a framework for managing quality in healthcare, and a structured approach to achieving significant improvement in systems performance in healthcare quality. Essential concepts and techniques in value-driven care will also be introduced. Students will learn to integrate evidence-based practice with data-driven improvement to drive improvement in both clinical quality outcomes and cost of healthcare for patients. There will be assignments including a quality improvement project writeup.
GMS5702
Patient Experience & Engagement
This course introduces health care professionals to the principles of patients for patient safety. Students will be introduced to concepts in culture of ownership in engaging patients for patient safety, patient advocacy and engagement, the advocacy roles and scope of involvement in healthcare improvement and patient safety. There will be assignments including a patient advocacy/engagement or inter-professional partnerships for patient safety project writeup.
GMS5703
Clinical Governance and Risk Management
Students are introduced to the principles of clinical governance and Enterprise Risk Management to improve quality and safety in care delivery. The course covers leadership accountability; clinical strategy; professional practice development and standards; accreditation and quality assurance versus improvement and setting zero harm goals.
Students will learn and understand the underlying fundamental system issues and the concepts of managing medical errors, adverse events, and harm; reactive versus proactive risk management; optimization of clinical care, accountability for the quality of care, assessment, and monitoring of clinical activities. There will be assignments including a risk management project writeup.
GMS5704
Patient Safety Science & Leadership for High Reliability in Healthcare
This is for local and institutional patient-safety (PS) leaders, which blends safety science and psychology in high-reliability systems and focuses on applicability, feasibility and use of evidence to enhance patient-care. It explains PS and quality ecosystem and relationship with its constituent cultures. Students learn about stakeholder’s engagement, how to formulate strategies in driving shared-commitment in building PS culture and achieving goals of PS and healthcare improvement. Students examine role of informatics in healthcare improvement and adopt value-driven approach to optimise patient-care cost.
GMS5721
Psychological and Workplace Safety
This course introduces health care professionals to the principles of healthy workplace, physical and psychological safety as well as joy at work framework and strategies. Students will learn to undertake an all-inclusive approach in understanding the roles of both individuals and workplace policies, systems, and processes, and the critical components in creating joy at work and enhancing safety. The course will cover key concepts in self-care, staff care and team care. There will be assignments including workplace or psychological safety project writeup.
GMS5722
Design Thinking and Human Factors in Healthcare
In healthcare, constantly evolving patient expectations and needs as well as complex and demanding task environments and processes can pose challenges for patients and healthcare staff. This course introduces healthcare professionals to principles of designing for humans through Design Thinking and Human Factors. Students will learn concepts, approaches and tools to analyse problems, and design systems or processes that are better fitted to human needs, motivations, abilities and limitations. The knowledge will be applicable for students who seek to improve work processes around them to make them safer and more satisfying for the human.
GMS5711
Organizational Effectiveness and Global Health Leadership for Patient Safety
This course is designed to introduce health care professionals to Global Patient Safety Action Plans towards eliminating avoidable harm in healthcare. Students will learn how to prioritize strategic direction for real actions to be undertaken by countries, healthcare institutions, industry partners in strengthening connected health systems. The importance of patient safety as a strategic priority for universal health coverage will be covered. Students will learn processes and factors associated with successful integration of evidence-based interventions within a particular setting, assess whether the core components of the original intervention were faithfully transported to the real-world setting and gain new knowledge about the adaptation of the implemented intervention to the local context
GMS5712
Education Approaches and Simulations in Patient Safety
This course introduces approaches to learning in patient safety(PS) and curriculum development process for PS. Students appreciate that learning is integrated, subject-centered and transformative. Approaches in course-designing, flipping classroom, using inter-professional teams effectively in class (including simulation), as well as conducting research on teaching and learning in addition to techniques in active learning, assessment of teaching and leading effective class discussions. This course discusses the content, curricular structures and teaching strategies of PS educational interventions and methods used for evaluating PS learning outcomes. It also assesses the needs and methods to introduce PS into healthcare professionals’ curricula.
GMS5749
Thesis Course
This course provides the opportunity for students to complete a literature review or small research study on an issue in the area of patient safety and healthcare quality. The aim is to critically evaluate methods and measures used to address the identified issue. Students will describe the results, discuss the outcomes and limitations as well as recommend actions to be taken based on the findings. The study and project can be conducted within the students' own healthcare institution or with SingHealth Duke-NUS and is guided by a thesis mentor.
Course Fees
The full programme will cost $54,000.00 before GST.
Do contact
us if you have enquiries regarding scholarships
Note
- Student Miscellaneous Fee (MSF): Students are required to pay an additional SGD136.20 (inclusive of GST) per semester. In the event that students do not take any courses that semester, they would not have to pay this fee.
- Please note that the Tuition Fee and Student Misc Fee (MSF) are non-refundable and non-transferable.
- All requests for withdrawal must be received 6 weeks before the start of the course. Late withdrawals will be subjected to payment of the FULL course fees. Any access to learning materials (online preparatory materials and course materials) will be considered as participation and no refunds will be allowed.
Registration Details
- Do take note there are residency requirements for the Master's programme. Do contact us if you need help with the residency options.
- Minimum Bachelor's Degree qualification
- Academic Transcripts
- Applicants must upload a copy of their academic transcripts
- English Proficiency
- English proficiency test scores is a requirement for all international applicants except those whose undergraduate or graduate degrees are from NUS, NTU, SMU or SUTD, or from English-speaking countries such as Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
To meet the English requirement for our programme, the following are the minimum scores that should be achieved: 85 (for TOEFL internet-based test) or an overall band score of 7.0 (for IELTS)
The TOEFL score or IELTS result is only valid for 2 years after the test and should be valid by the end of the application deadline for the programme.
Applicants should email a scanned copy of the official TOEFL/IELTS scoresheets to lifelonglearning@duke-nus.edu.sg during the online application period. IELTS scoresheets must display your Test Report Form Number.