Course Description
Preventable patient harms, including medical errors and healthcare-associated complications, are a global public health threat. Moreover, patients frequently do not receive treatments and interventions known to improve their outcomes. These shortcomings typically result not from individual clinicians’ mistakes, but from systemic problems - communication breakdowns, poor teamwork, and poorly designed care processes, to name a few.
The Patient Safety course covers the concepts and methodologies used in process improvement within healthcare. Successful participants will develop a system’s view of safety and quality challenges and will learn strategies for improving culture, enhancing teamwork, managing change and measuring success. They will also lead all aspects of a patient safety and/or quality improvement project, applying the methods described over the five sections in the specialization.
What Do Participants Learn?
- Understand the importance of patient safety and understand how errors may occur
- Reduce errors and the clinicians’ responsibility in ensuring patient safety
- Know what changes are needed in primary care to improve patient safety
- Know what the barriers are to patients’ understanding of risk and how to test their understanding
- Understand how patient involvement and open disclosure can improve the quality and safety of healthcare systems
- Understand which drugs and clinical settings carry particular risks
- Understand the causes and frequency of drug errors and how to reduce their incidences in clinical practice.
Who Should Attend?
- Pharmacists
- Nurses
- Medical Doctors
- Risk Managers
- Therapists
What Will the Learning Experience Include?
Phase: 1
Introduce
- Comprehensive pre-program activities include:
- Web-based information forms & surveys completed by attendee.
- Direct consultation with the attendee about the expectations.
- During the training, participants engage in data, activities, and conversations that lead to insight and knowledge.
- Participants learn from expert trainers who have both academic and business experiences.
- Highly applicable training content & instructive activities for adding depth to training topics.
- **A half-day site visit for integrating the experience & plan next steps. Opportunities to provide connections, ideas & support.
Phase: 2
Explore & Practice
Phase: 3
Apply
- Apply & sustain the learning experience by using this ongoing support:
- To ensure participant has new skills or behavior progress.
- Optional, fee-based mentoring & coaching with the trainer.
- Training materials & additional documents (e-books, pdf files, presentations and articles)
- Evaluate your training experience by giving us feedbacks and help us to reach our organizational goals.
- Participant's Evaluation
- Trainer's Evaluation
Phase: 4
EVALUATE
Section One:
- Why patient safety is an important aspect of patient care
- Why and how primary care needs to change to improve patient safety
- How to involve patients and other members of the primary care team in improving patient safety
Section Two:
- What the barriers are to patients' understanding of risk
- The importance of literacy, numeracy, and the language of risk
- How to communicate with different patient groups
- How to test understanding
- The increasing role of patient decision and visual aids in consultations
- How to calculate absolute and relative risk.
Section Three:
- Know how focus on patient involvement can improve the quality and safety of a healthcare system
- Understand the benefits of open disclosure
- Know about some current initiatives in promoting open disclosure.
Section Four:
- Understand the causes and frequency of drug errors
- Find out which drugs and clinical settings carry particular risks
- Develop practical approaches to reduce drug errors in clinical practice.
Section Five:
- How good team work can improve patient care
- How hierarchies can disrupt good teamwork
- How to deal with people who are not good team members
- Why reducing variability improves safety.
- How to encourage openness in health care
- Maintaining effective relationships with patients and families
- What to do when mistakes happen
- What makes patients take legal action