Summary: Improving Patient Safety

The complexity of health care recently has increased the risk of error and accidental harm and medical trainees' knowledge about patient safety has been shown to be limited as mentioned in yanli et al. study (2011) (12).Improving patient safety has been on top of research agenda’s worldwide during the last two decades,

The WHO Curriculum Guide was developed 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 (1).

This study was designed to prepare an outline of patient safety curriculum to be integrated vertically into the six medical years, implement

(2011) (13) study as the evaluation team from university of Aberdeen published an interim report describing the implementation of patient safety in ten medical schools in nine countries among the six WHO regions around the world. Most schools have delivered more than one topic and some have implemented all the eleven topics. The implementation was done in eighteen months and included different topics according to each school (minimum three) and evaluation tools were established such as pre and post questionnaires for students and tutors and focus groups. The reports from the three project leaders of the same study indicate that the WHO Patient Safety Curriculum Guide is highly valued with a clear structure and excellent content. The sections provided advice on how to teach patient safety and the examples and suggested resources are particularly

The results demonstrate that the lowest mean score was for pre-test in the "infection control" topic and the highest was for "medication safety" topic, while results show that the lowest mean score was for post-test in the "infection control" topic while the highest was for "what is patient safety" topic. The results demonstrate that there was a statistically significant difference between the interns' mean scores of the pre- and the post-tests for the three topics. These results were in accordance with Patey et al. (2011) (13)as the results of the first topic "what is patient safety" showed significantly increased levels of knowledge of error and patient safety from each of the schools who returned before and after questionnaires, while in the "Infection control" topic the specific item of “knowing how” to perform appropriate actions showed increased level of knowledge, finally in the "medication safety" topic no statistically significant changes were observed in all measures except self-efficacy, also in Farely et al. (2013) (18) study, similar findings were recorded as there was a statistically significant difference between per- and post- teaching in a 508 students answering "what is patient safety" topic, while in 286 students answering "infection