Patient Safety in Medical Education

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Patient Safety in Medical Education
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• A very important aspect of medical education that
  had been overlooked for a long time is patient
  safety. When patient safety in medical education
  gets relegated to the backseat the result is
  there for everyone to see something like close
  to a 100,000 deaths at the turn of the previous
  century, according to the alarming results of a
  comprehensive study carried out by the Institute
  of Medicine.

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• The tragedy of these deaths is that these were
  preventable. This reinforces the belief that
  patient safety in medical education is the core
  factor, which if handled properly, can save
  thousands of lives.

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How does patient safety in medical education come
about?

• It goes without saying that physicians and other
  caregivers practice in their professions what
  they learn in schools. So, patient safety in
  medical education has to be incorporated into the
  curriculum at the earliest stages. Hospitals,
  medical colleges and other institutes that impart
  medical education have now started taking more
  than mere baby steps in inculcating patient
  safety in medical education as a core part of
  teaching, the already heavily burdened curriculum
  in medical education notwithstanding.

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Efforts by medical education bodies

• Following the publication of the IOM report, the
  American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC)
  and the Curriculum Management and Information
  Tool (CurrMit) in the US and Medical Schools
  Council and the General Medical Council (GMC) in
  the UK sprang into action, announcing a slew of
  measures aimed at bringing about and reinforcing
  patient safety in medical education.

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• Entire lessons and chapters are devoted to
  patient safety in medical education. Keywords and
  technical jargon relating to patient safety are
  now a highly visible aspect of patient safety in
  medical education. These are spread across all
  disciples and subjects of medical education, be
  it gynecology or anesthetics.

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What should curricula teach about patient safety
in medical education?

• Apart from emphasizing the criticality of patient
  safety in the curricula medical textbooks and
  other sources of education heavily stress the
  importance of patient safety by filling the
  curricula with patient safety-related keywords
  such as "human error", "medication error",
  "adverse event", "quality improvement", and so on.

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• More importantly, those who study medicine at
  various levels, such as medical undergraduates,
  graduates, post graduates and those pursuing even
  higher studies have to be made aware of the need
  for making patient safety a part of their
  practice culture. It should be embedded into
  their very thought process. Safety improvement
  tools have to be implanted irrevocably into their
  thinking and practice to the extent that it
  becomes second nature to them. This should be
  implemented by them at every stage throughout
  their careers. This is the entire aim of patient
  safety in medical education.

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