(WHO) Patient Safety Curriculum Guide - CAIPE

Introduction
The Multi-professional Edition of the Patient
Safety Curriculum Guide is a comprehensive
guide to assist effective capacity building in
patient safety education by health-care academic
institutions. As patient safety teaching is relatively
new for most health-care educators, the
Curriculum Guide provides, in a single publication,
educational frameworks and features a variety
of concepts and methods for teaching and
assessing patient safety.
The present Curriculum Guide is designed to be
easily integrated into existing health-care
education curricula using a flexible approach
to meet individual needs, and is applicable
to different cultures and contexts. While it offers
health-care schools and universities a
recommended framework and resource materials,
individual adaptations to local requirements,
settings, student learning needs and resources
are encouraged.
The development of the Multi-professional
Curriculum Guide began in January 2010 and
is based on the Curriculum Guide for Medical
Schools, published in 2009. A core working group
comprised of experts from international
professional associations in dentistry, medicine,
midwifery, nursing and pharmacy, as well as
from the WHO regions, coordinated the work
of reviewing the 2009 Curriculum Guide,
assessing available scientific evidence, and
rewriting sections as they would apply to dentists,
midwives, nurses and pharmacists. They also
provided multi-professional case studies to
support interdisciplinary learning and actively
fostered discussion among experts and authors.
More than 50 international experts contributed
to preparing this document. Authors, contributors,
experts, and other professionals who actively
participated and facilitated the work process
are listed in the acknowledgements section at
the end of the document.
Sections of the Curriculum Guide
The document comprises two parts: Part A:
Teacher’s Guide; and Part B: 11 Patient Safety
Topics. For convenience, the figures and tables
are numbered to correspond to the part and
the section in which they are presented.
Part A is aimed at health-care educators.
It supports them with knowledge and tools,
and helps them develop the skills necessary
for implementing patient safety education
in their institutions. Part A provides a systematic
approach to building institutional capacity.
It offers background information on how to select
and teach each curriculum topic, makes
suggestions on how to integrate patient safety
teaching, and provides techniques for exploring
how this subject could fit into the institution’s
existing curricula. Part A also highlights the
educational principles that are essential to patient
safety teaching and learning and proposes
approaches for student assessment, as well as
evaluation of the current patient safety curricula.
The importance of faculty engagement as an
essential component for maintaining the
sustainability of the programme is emphasized
throughout the document. At the same time,
clear examples on how patient safety might be
taught are provided throughout Part A.
Part B addresses health-care educators
and students. It contains 11 ready-to-teach,
topic-based, patient safety programmes that can
be used as a whole or on a per topic basis.
The topics cover a wide range of contexts
in which patient safety can be taught and learned.
The 11 topics are:
Topic 1: What is patient safety?
Topic 2: Why applying human factors is important
for patient safety.
Topic 3: Understanding systems and the effect
of complexity on patient care.
WHO Patient Safety Curriculum Guide: Multi-professional Edition
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