WHO: The Multi-Professional Patient Safety Curriculum Guide (2011)

Summary

The Multi-professional Patient Safety Curriculum Guide (2011) was developed by the World Health Organization to assist in the teaching of patient safety in universities and schools in the fields of dentistry, medicine, midwifery, nursing and pharmacy. It also supports the on-going training of all healthcare professionals.

Content

The Curriculum Guide is comprised of two parts. Part A is a teachers’ guide designed to introduce patient safety concepts to educators. It relates to building capacity for patient safety education, programme planning and design of the courses. Part B provides all-inclusive, ready-to-teach, topic-based patient safety courses that can be used as a whole, or on a per topic basis. There are 11 patient safety topics, each designed to feature a variety of ideas and methods for patient safety learning. Universities are encouraged to start with Part A which provides comprehensive advice on how to introduce and build patient safety courses.

The associated resources include teaching slides on the following topics:

• What is Patient Safety?
• Why applying human factors is important for patient safety
• Understanding systems and the effect of complexity on patient care
• Being an effective team player
• Learning from errors to prevent harm
• Understanding and managing clinical risk
• Using quality-improvement methods to improve care
• Engaging with patients and carers
• Infection prevention and control
• Patient safety and invasive procedures
• Improving medication safety.