THE COMMUNITY OF COMPETENCE™
Community has become the metaphor for team and organization. Major driving forces
in sociology, socialization, self-organizing systems, and systems thinking have fostered
the creation of a new framework and methodology to describe, assess, and combine
separate strengths and core competencies of individuals, groups, and organizations
into a goal-oriented whole.
Elizabeth A. Smith, Ph.D., Founder of Community Medical Foundation for Patient Safety,
developed and trademarked the Community of Competence™ as a competency-based collaborative
community and network that is more dynamic and flexible than high-performance teams
or autonomous work groups. Quality outcomes and patient safety are the direct products
of a competent medical team or the Community of Competence™ in Health Care of this
century.
We apply this framework and methodology to our research and educational programs
that include our ambitious outreach campaign to build Community, Awareness, Responsibility
and Empowerment (CARE) for patient safety, our National Patient Safety Community
with its directory, and our own institutional review board (IRB) of expert panel
that conducts comprehensive scientific research review of our research studies and
projects to ensure and maintain utmost ethical conduct for the protection of human
research participants, optimal stewardship of funds, safeguard of intellectual properties
(e.g., copyrights, patents, trade secrets), proper use of effective study design,
appropriate data collection and management, planned analysis and reporting of scientific
findings. We accept external study proposals by contract and strictly apply our
standards in evaluation, audit and final determination for approval or disapproval
based on scientific merits and the attributes mentioned above.
