Designing a Patient Safety Undergraduate Medical Curriculum: The Telluride Interdisciplinary Roundtable Experience

Abstract

A patient safety curriculum, developed by a group of experts for an undergraduate medical education population, was successfully developed over a two-year period of time. Future meetings of the Telluride Roundtable group have centered on evaluation and refinement of these curricular elements as pilots occur in a number of medical schools, and new curricular ideas continue to be developed. Continued interprofessional dialogue and collaborative research will enable the development and implementation of a standardized longitudinal patient safety student curriculum.

Patient Safety Instruction in US Health Professions Education

“…40,41 An interdisciplinary group of healthcare providers, senior healthcare administration, students, residents, patient advocacy leaders, and curriculum development/assessment experts met to develop a patient safety undergraduate medical curriculum and identified 11 specific elements essential to an effective patient safety curriculum for medical students 42 : the history of the medical error crisis, interdisciplinary teamwork skills, time and stress management, healthcare microsystems, informatics, electronic medical records, and healthcare technology, error science, error management, and human factor science, communication skills, techniques of full-disclosure, risk management and root cause analysis, continuous quality improvement including outcome measures, and medication errors and reconciliation. 42 Many of the programs cited in this review included these elements as part of their patient safety initiatives. However, some of the initiatives were limited in scope and emphasized only a subset of the 11 specific elements, while others were embedded in the curriculum and included all of these elements.…”

Introducing patient safety to undergraduate medical students – A pilot program delivered by health care administrators

“…Both brief (Halbach & Sullivan 2005;Patey et al 2007) and extended (Mayer et al 2009) curricula on patient safety have been described, and the formats may vary from the use of team-based patient safety events (Anderson et al 2009) to video-assisted simulation (Flanagan et al 2004;Mayer et al 2009). Improvement in students' knowledge and awareness has been reported although not all positive changes were sustained (Halbach & Sullivan 2005;Madigosky et al 2006).…”

Simulation in clinical teaching and learning

“…Formal classroom teaching should be the prelude to the development of desired skills and behaviors that are both taught and modeled by the faculty-an approach that has potential applications well beyond the teaching of patient safety. 71 A discussion of what constitutes an appropriate patient safety curriculum is beyond the scope of this paper. However, several detailed patient safety curricula have been or are being developed.…”

“…Finally, the Telluride Interdisciplinary Roundtable, sponsored by the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine (SIU), has developed general curricular principles and identified essential elements of an effective patient safety curriculum. 71 The orientation of these latter patient safety curriculum development efforts is clearly multi-disciplinary and underlines the importance of medical school leadership in identifying inter-disciplinary education and training opportunities as the foundation for future teamwork development activities.…”