The Department of Medicine first started recognizing contributions to the related fields of healthcare quality, patient safety, and innovation in 2007. The awards recognize outstanding leadership or academic contributions that aim to improve the quality of healthcare. Examples might include efforts to improve the degree to which patients receive proven aspects of care (eg, increasing guideline concordant care), reducing harms to patients from medical care (patient safety), as well as innovations in health services delivery—new models care of that improve outcomes, the patient experience, or healthcare value.
Awards were not given every year, but, having achieved a critical mass of faculty working in this area, we decided in 2016 to follow the model for both the research and education awards, and award a William Goldie Travel Prize and Award to a junior faculty member (within 10 years of first appointment) as well an award for senior faculty. For consistency’s sake, we have categorized the past winners as either junior or senior, even though that distinction did not always exist.