Patient Safety Education Project Description

Managing patients’ risk for injury while they are receiving medical care is a national priority in the United States and other countries. While this has been true for at least five years - ever since the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine (IOM) reported that medical errors were the 4th to 8th largest cause of preventable death - little progress has been made.

The difficulty is that large gaps exist between what is now well agreed on and should be happening and what actually is happening. In a February 2005 meeting, prominent patient safety leaders met as the Planning Committee for the Patient Safety Education Project to discuss these gaps and how to close them. While high quality patient safety curricular materials have been produced by highly regarded organizations, no consensus currently exists about what a core curriculum for the field of patient safety should be. Further, most professional and paraprofessional medical team members currently in the work force have not been trained in safety sciences. Acknowledging that a strong need for such training exists, the Planning Committee set out a blue print for the Patient Safety Education Project to help meet this need.

To craft a comprehensive, learner friendly, high quality, patient safety curriculum, the Patient Safety Education Project (PSEP) will build on existing curricular material and will use the Australia’s National Patient Safety Framework to guide the scope and content. Using a nationally coordinated, collaborative approach, the Framework identified skills, knowledge and behaviors/attitudes to guide patient safety education for health care workers at all levels within health care.

PSEP will use a high-impact education-dissemination mechanism, originally developed for palliative care and proven to be extremely effective, which uses a curriculum-driven approach grounded in specific adult learning methods to teach both content and how to disseminate it. The Core Safety Curriculum covers content on patient safety for clinicians and other medical team members. The PSEP program will teach teams of physicians, nurses and administrators to become Trainers who will then go back to their institutions and teach patient safety using the Core Safety Curriculum. Trainers will be provided with skills in the best adult teaching methods and practices for their own settings. Extensive resources will be provided for these Trainers. Using them, they will be easily able to adapt the materials to what best suits their end-learners’ needs and particular organization’s work culture. PSEP will use conferences, various Web-based interactions, such as distance learning modules, blogs, and listserv announcements to foster an interactive Patient Safety Virtual College (PSVC).

Critical to the success of this initiative is the buy-in of important, patient safety leaders. Therefore, the Governing Council for PSEP convened in May 2006. Its members comprise a who’s who of internationally known thought-leaders in patient safety including such luminaries as: Harvey Fineberg, MD, PhD, President, Institute of Medicine, Lucian Leape, MD, MPH, Harvard School of Public Health, and Donald Berwick, Institute for Healthcare Improvement. With input from another group of experts, the Advisory Group, which convened on September 6 2006 and provides on-going advice, a high-level team of editors and writers are building the Core Safety Curriculum.

Using the Core Safety Curriculum and high-impact education-dissemination, PSEP will bring patient safety practices to health care institutions throughout the country and will evaluate its impact using a rigorous health services research and education research design and methods.