Patient Safety Skills

Evaluating Knowledge, Skills and Attitude Toward Patients’

Safety Among Medical Students in Saudi Arabia

Introduction:

Patient Safety is defined as "a type of process or structure when applied it reduces the probability of adverse events resulting from exposure to the health care system across a range of diseases and procedures” (1), that is according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the National Quality Forum (NQF).

These practices focus mainly on many safety issues concerning hospitalized patients, nursing homes or ambulatory patients. They deal with measures and fundamental tools that should be applied in general medical practice, since many factors such as knowledge, skills and attitudes in the context of patient

King Abdulaziz University offers a stand-alone module as part of their curriculum that has been adopted from the WHO Patient Safety Curriculum for Medical Schools (5). Thus, it resembles the intervention sample, as their program enables students to combine knowledge, attitudes and skills to achieve a deeper understanding of how their performance impacts on patient safety and the quality of healthcare.

This paper aims to identify the problem regarding patient safety and evaluate the impact of teaching patient safety principles in one of its major universities in Saudi Arabia.

It also evaluates the self-ratings of the students’ knowledge, attitudes and skills regarding errors and patient safety in a total of six medical schools in Saudi Arabia. It will highlight the initial results of the implementation and initial evaluation of the module by the medical students of King Abdulaziz University.

The authors and ethical committees at KAU reviewed the questionnaire.

Conducting a study among medical students took place in six different universities in Saudi Arabia in different formats, hardcopy and soft copy. KAU teaches patients’ safety objectives in a structured module, while the other universities (at the time of the study was conducted) follow the traditional lecture based learning (LBL) method; this difference provide an exposed and non-exposed samples with total number of 700 students. The recruitment process was parallel between two major target groups to avoid demographic discrepancy.

The students were randomly chosen according to the probability of proportionate size of the classes in all the medical schools that were contributed in the study. Finally, the data were coded, analyzed and manipulated using a Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS)