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Table 2 Trainees’ Quotes Representing Themes and Subthemes

From: Factors predicting training transfer in health professionals participating in quality improvement educational interventions

Trainee Characteristics:

 • Attitude toward change:

  - Positive attitude toward change:

    “I think the people who are believers in change are the ones that tend to get the most out of the course and are most likely to apply their tools.” —P227

  - Conditional/situational attitude toward change:

    “Although I would love to see this change happen, I’m one of the people who won’t do it because the way I like to do things is not—it will end up taking me as much time as to invest in letting someone else do it.” —P303

 • Motivation to learn and transfer QI skills:

   “So I think it’s an internal motivation that quality is important, that safety is important.” —P106

   “So my own set of motivations was how I could make the clinic experience where I am and the patient experience where I’m working better. And I knew that we would figure out a way to do that through the context of the course one way or the other.” —P129

 • Interpersonal skills:

   “And you need somebody who can communicate and can sort of rally the troops behind your idea.” —P190

 • Mental processing skills:

   “It was nice to kind of learn the tools to organize and analyze a problem and brainstorm solutions and how to label those solutions in different aspects of tackling a problem.” —P152

 • Personality characteristics:

  - Curiosity:

    “If you’re not willing to be open minded and curious then you can’t really deliver care because things never happen the way that you think they’re supposed to.” —P129

  - Humility:

    “I’m not a very creative person. What I think has been really wonderful on the teams that I’ve worked on is that everybody has different skill sets that they bring to the team.” —P227

  - Conscientiousness:

    “When you look at the projects themselves, like when they pick the projects, they need to make sure that it’s really going to make a difference to the institution or to the patients or whatever they are looking at.” —P028

  - Resilience:

    “I was always kind of taught in life, and somebody told me early on, that hurdles are formed for people that can’t get over hurdles. And I always kind of looked at things like that and if I run up against a situation and it doesn’t work for me, I can still be persistent.” —P072

  - Wisdom:

    “I’m always of the kind of mind set that I need to try to make the right decision. And if somebody above me makes a wrong decision, that’s not my—that’s not my fault.” —P072

  - Positivity:

    “I’ve had more projects fail because I didn’t have the right people in the committee, and all my failures were just as important as all the successful projects.” —P248

Training Course:

 • Project:

   “I think a formal course is very important because you understand about process maps and those kinds of things. But I think that if you don’t connect that with a real-day project, it’s not helpful. It’s too theoretical.” —P029

 • Team-based learning:

   “I think the team-based learning was very good… So that’s—that really helped me. And right now, like when I think about it, like process improvement, it’s like everybody working together, because everybody has their own qualities.” —P028

 • Lectures:

   “The invited speakers really changed the way that I actually thought about how we deliver healthcare and sort of what we might think about doing moving forward.” —P129

Work Environment:

 • Work culture:

  - Change-driven culture:

    “Well, we’ve had this culture for the past thirty years or twenty-five years, and it’s the same people. They have the same mindset. And they just don’t want to change. So it’s very difficult.” —P028

   “I think our department is set up in a way that allows for the opportunity to bring new ideas to help change.” – P227

   “We’re always looking for a change because we are a new specialty. Not many of us are around. We are—all of the faculty are—open for a change. If you get a new idea, they jump on it.” – P237

  - Work stress:

    “This place is a wonderful place to work, but a lot of pressure and burden…. If I’m under stress, I don’t feel like doing the project I was supposed to do.” —P234

 • Work relationships:

  - Relationship with supervisor:

    “You could have all the motivation. However, if there is no alignment with what your supervisors, your managers have, you might not go anywhere with it—with this motivation.” — P106

  - Relationship with peers:

    “I think our group is fairly receptive to quality improvement projects. You know—there was initially some resistance, but I think all of us kind of know each other well enough where we know that we’re not trying to increase our own workload or make our lives more difficult.” —P152

 • Resources:

  - Time:

    “The main resource I would say is time. It’s difficult to find the time to do these—to even go to these meetings, to come up with ideas and to organize ideas, and do data collection if we need to.” — P152

  - Financial resources:

    “I think one of the goals should be figuring out how to do quality without having dedicated resources because I think it’s unrealistic in today’s climate that you will have anything you want at your fingertips. Learning to be resourceful is a skill that is necessary to make projects succeed.” —P227