Access Of Care

PlayBuild is an after-school program located in New Orleans which repurposes vacant lots around central city to engage kids with the architectural history and design of public spaces with outdoor play with imagination playground and design challenges. Do these activities have unique cognitive learning opportunities that warrant investment, and if so what curriculum decisions contribute to positive learning outcomes and what kinds of methodology are feasible to measure such a cognitive development among children? A literature review on play and children’s cognitive development has been done to explore these three questions. Before detailing particular research findings, below is a brief summary of this literature review. Research suggests that role play, joint action, and physically modeling objects, spaces, or systems can develop perspective-taking and systems literacy (Harris, Vygotsky, Schwartz et al., Sebanz et al., 2006). Research comparing invention-based curriculum with teaching-practice curriculums show evidence of perspective change (e.g., seeing deep structural relationships vs. surface feature covariation) and evidence that perception of deep structure correlates with increases in understanding and transfer. Invention-based curriculums have the potential to engage participants in fantasy and role play as well as scale to forms of meaningful sociocultural participation in the community. Design and construction of diagrams and models of homes, cities, spaces, or city systems grounded in the community and history of New Orleans is worth an investment because it affords opportunities to develop perspective-taking, systems reasoning, metacognition, and mathematical and spatial thinking skills through meaningful participation in local community culture.

Sample Solution

Healthcare organizations must strive to maintain high standards of quality in order to ensure that their patients receive safe, effective, timely and equitable patient care. Quality improvement initiatives are essential for healthcare organizations as they help identify areas where change can be made in order to provide better care and improve outcomes for patients. The white paper has discussed an initiative based on a particular quality measure from Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services data which will serve as an example of how healthcare organizations can work towards improving the overall quality of care provided by Medicare-certified hospitals across the nation. An evaluation using quality improvement principles was provided which supports this initiative recommendation, as well as additional information regarding monitoring, tracking and multi-disciplinary approaches that would be necessary in order to achieve desired results from such an initiative.