Improving Patient Safety Content/About

This page is under development:

Population Target for this WikiEducator page: Health Care Professionals

Problem: The Institute of Medicine (IOM) reported in 2000 that 44,000-98,000 die from medical error each year. There is no indication that this has improved over the last decade since the IOM report was published. Current culture in healthcare has lead to both fear of reporting and complacency. There are many things we can do to better understand the system of care, how care is delivered, and what we can do today to make the necessary changes to improve our systems of safety for all patients.

Purpose of the educational plan is to:

• Outline the problem of patient safety in healthcare
• Provide specific conceptual support from literature and reputable patient safety organizations for creating a meaningful communication, "from the bottom up" and feedback loop so that staff members are encouraged, rather than discouraged from reporting errors and near misses.
• Inspire culture change that recognizes the importance of reporting, that rewards the reporter by showing results of reporting, and that highlights the value of reporting in improvements to quality and safety of patient care.

Overall Educational Goals:

• Increase healthcare professionals' knowledge of medical error, the role of reporting errors as a patient safety strategy and change the culture and pattern of reporting error.
• Inspire better understanding of the concept of "systems" and "culture" so that these concepts can be applied to overall improvements in care.

To complete this program:

1. Review the Objectives section
2. Print the Treasure Hunt form
3. Review the Definitions section
4. Explore the Web Resources section to "hunt" for the answers.
5. Take as much time as you need. If you have little familiarity with the subject, you may want view every video, slide show, website, etc, and this course will take you about 2 hours. Others may complete the Treasure Hunt in as little as 15-30 minutes. With WikiEducator, there are no limitations. You can visit the site as often as necessary, stay as long as you want.