Inaugural 'Become a PSEP Safety Trainer' Conference

The Patient Safety Education Project (PSEP) recently held its two and a half-day inaugural ‘Become a PSEP Safety Trainer’ event in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from May 30-June 1, 2008. This event was funded by the Jewish Healthcare Foundation in conjunction with the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative. Doctors, nurses and other health care professionals from the US, Australia, Singapore, and Malaysia attended. Attendees learned about human factors design, systems thinking, teamwork, and patient engagement from leading patient safety and medical education experts. They also received hands-on experience in implementing clinical practice improvement methods.

All participants are now certified ‘PSEP trainers’ and will be returning to their home institutions to disseminate the safety and quality improvement knowledge they learned. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons sent a team of three and has plans to train half of their entire membership. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, which sent a team of five to the conference, will be working with the local support of the Jewish Healthcare Foundation to continue teaching the PSEP program materials within their institutions. At the conference, teams also used the Plan Do Study Act (PDSA) cycle to formulate improvement ideas that they could utilize at their home institutions. Additionally, the PSEP core team will be improving the comprehensive curriculum based upon feedback from participants and master facilitators.

Here’s what some of the participants had to say:

“Outstanding! Broad in scope; deep in content.”

“Outstanding set of presenters. Their energy and interest added much to the experience. Additionally, the resources and presentations are excellent!”

“I plan on educating our safety members and staff, and to implement a system process to identify the root cause of our most common medical error which is the error of omission.”

“The curriculum contains excellent research and organization. It is ready to use for [project] implementation.”

“The trigger tapes are very beneficial to training.”

 
The inaugural ‘Become a PSEP Safety Trainer’ event was attended by a diverse group of international educators and clinicians. Peter Fabri, MD, PhD of the University of South Florida teaches a session on methods for clinical practice improvement.

Linda Emanuel, MD PhD, principal of the Patient Safety Education Project, leads a groups of Australian patient safety educators in a PDSA cycle.

Debora Simmons, RN, MSN, of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, facilitates a small group session on conducting a root cause analysis (RCA).

Dr. Emanuel explains the nature of the PSEP program during a plenary session.