In the report, Health Professions Education, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) identified core competencies for all healthcare professionals. These competencies are important because they identify core competencies that should be addressed in all healthcare professionals' education: nurses, physicians, pharmacists, allied health professionals, and healthcare administrators. These competencies are based on the need to improve healthcare quality and the recognition that healthcare professional education was not effectively including these five critical competencies. The five core competencies are summarized here (IOM, 2003):

• Provide patient/person-centered care: Identify, respect, and care about patients' differences, values, preferences, and expressed needs; relieve pain and suffering; coordinate continuous care; listen to, clearly inform, communicate with, and educate patients; share decision-making and management; and continuously advocate disease prevention, wellness, and promotion of healthy lifestyles, including a focus on population health.
• Work in interprofessional teams: Cooperate, communicate, and integrate care in teams to ensure continuous and reliable care.
• Employ evidence-based practice: Integrate the best research with clinical expertise and patient values for optimal care and participate in learning and research activities to the extent feasible.
• Apply quality improvement: Identify errors and hazards in care; understand and implement basic safety design principles, such as standardization and simplification; continually understand and measure the quality of care in terms of structure, process, and outcomes concerning patient and community needs; and design and test interventions to change processes and systems of care to improve quality.
• Utilize informatics: Communicate, manage knowledge, mitigate error, and support decision-making using information technology.

These five competencies are interrelated and should all be applied in most clinical interactions. This competency-based approach to healthcare education should lead to improved quality because educators should be able to gather data about learning outcomes that could then be associated with better patient care, the desired goal. The competencies are related to Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) and are discussed in the content.

Reproduced from Institute of Medicine (IOM). (2003). Health professions education. National Academies Press.