(WHO) Patient Safety Curriculum Guide - CAIPE

topic. Many of the topics are best delivered once
the student has experienced their professional
work environment as so much of patient safety
learning requires a team approach and observation
of the health service as a whole, not just the area
where the student happens to be placed.
The topics have been designed so that students
can be responsible for much of their own learning
through reading online material that provides
them with the underpinning knowledge required,
followed by tasks that can be performed to put
the acquired knowledge into practice.
We encourage the different faculties and health
professions to add relevant professional literature
and data to the topics that directly concern their
profession. For example, we would expect that
relevant pharmacy articles and data collections be
included for pharmacy students. Because this
is a Multi-professional Curriculum Guide we were
unable to provide examples for all professions,
but we have included as many as possible where
available and relevant.
What is the Curriculum Guide?
The Curriculum Guide is a comprehensive
programme for the implementation of patient
safety education in health-care educational
institutions worldwide. It comprises two parts.
Part A is a teacher’s guide, which has been
designed to assist teachers to implement the
Curriculum Guide. As we are aware that patient
safety is a new discipline and many health-care
professionals and faculty staff will be unfamiliar
with many of the concepts and principles, this
part lays the foundations for capacity-building
in patient safety education. Part B provides
a comprehensive, ready-to-teach, topic-based
patient safety programme that can be implemented
either as a whole or on a per topic basis.
Why was the Curriculum Guide
developed?
Since the Harvard study [1] in 1991 first described
the extent of harm to patients, other countries
have reported similar results, notwithstanding
the differences in their cultures and health
systems. The realization that health care actually
harms patients has increased scrutiny of patient
care in the context of an increasingly complex
health system. This complexity has been
intensified by rapidly changing medical technology
and service demands [2,3]. Doctors, nurses,
midwives, dentists, pharmacists, and other
health-care professionals are expected to manage
this complexity in their daily work, provide
evidence-based health-care services, and maintain
a safe environment for patients. However, unless
they are properly educated and trained in patient
safety concepts and principles they will struggle
to do this.
Patient safety education for health-care
professionals in the higher education sector has
not kept up with workforce requirements [3-7]. For
example, incident reporting systems for medication
errors or surgical mistakes have been in use for
many years in several countries, but accounts
of specific curricula related to health-care errors or
patient safety courses embedded in undergraduate
education have started to be described only
recently in the published literature [5,8].
A number of factors have impeded patient safety
education. First, the lack of recognition by
health-care educators that teaching and learning
patient safety should be an essential part of the
undergraduate curricula for health-care students,
and that patient safety skills can be taught [9,10].
Many educators are unfamiliar with the literature
and are unsure how to integrate patient safety
learning into existing curricula [11,12]. Second,
educators need to be open to new areas of
knowledge [3]. One of the difficulties in
introducing new curricula is a reluctance to address
knowledge that originates from outside one’s
profession, such as systems thinking and qualityimprovement
methods [10]. It has also been
suggested that the historical emphasis on
treatment of disease rather than prevention of
illness creates a culture that finds it difficult to give
merit to a “non-event”, i.e. a preventable adverse
event [3]. A third factor relates to entrenched
attitudes regarding the traditional teacher-student
relationship- one that may be hierarchical
and competitive [9] and where an “expert”
disseminates information to the student [3,4].
This Curriculum Guide seeks to fill the gap
in patient safety education by providing
a comprehensive curriculum designed to build
foundation knowledge and skills for all health-care
students that will better prepare them for clinical
practice in a range of environments.
References
1. Brennan TA et al. Incidence of adverse events
and negligence in hospitalized patients: results
of the Harvard Medical Practice Study I. New
England Journal of Medicine, 1991, 324:370–376.
2. Runciman B, Merry A, Walton M. Safety and
ethics in healthcare: a guide to getting it right, 1st ed.
Aldershot, UK, Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2007.
3. Stevens D. Finding safety in medical education.
Quality & Safety in Health Care, 2002,11:109–110.
23 Part A 1. Background