Teaching students’ patient safety core competencies: results of an Italian program

Background Patient safety is a fundamental step to achieve better quality of care. Building standardized, effective curricula for medical students, based on patient safety core competencies defined by WHO and ASPHER, is an important premise. The Academic Hospital of Udine has implemented a new course since 2013 for this specific topic and in late 2016 was able to perform a long-term follow-up reassessment. Objective The new course was provided before the start of medical students’ clinical activities (beginning of the 3rd year). The contents followed the WHO Patient Safety Curriculum Guide. Students who already passed both frontal lessons and web seminar received a single follow-up test respectively after 1, 2, 3 years, organized into 7 thematic areas (20 items). 2nd year students naïve to the topics were tested for benchmark. Results The 2016 follow-up test involved volunteers previously enrolled in the past editions. Follow-up attendance was steady for 4th and 5th year (93%;92%) but dropped in the last one (72%).The benchmark scored poorly in all fields (46.0% correct answers) but infections and hand hygiene (91%). The three most improved areas were drug safety, communication and risk management (+80.6%; +54.0%; +49.8% p < 0.001). Follow-up results did not show a drop in results over time with a significant improvement of 46.6% (p < 0.001). 6th year students with a score higher than 90% were 92%, 4th year students were 87%.Effective communication and risk management were the only areas scoring on average less than 90% (84%; 85%) but none of each had a significant performance drop (p = 0.307). Conclusions The evaluation of the course effectiveness demonstrated that the introduction of a standardized program for patient safety provides good results which can be maintained over time. An early exposition to these topics can be exploited for other initiatives concerning safety and in the future can provide measurable changes in clinical attitudes on patient safety culture. Key messages: Building standardized curricula and the use of internationally validated sources are important steps for patient safety, with approaches that can be monitored, compared and used by different systems. Teaching key professional contents in healthcare pre-graduation courses should be established as early as possible to widely share patient safety culture and facilitate the achievement of goals.