Using Care Opinion stories to deliver a Patient Safety Workshop to final year medical students at Warwick Medical School

Summary

In this blog, Professor of Medical Education Kate Owen explains how her team has embedded a session on patient safety in the final year curriculum at Warwick Medical School. Using a real-life story posted on the Care Opinion website, the session gives medical students an opportunity to use investigation tools, understand NHS reporting systems and consider the importance of compassionate communication with harmed patients and their families.

Content

Patient safety is a fundamental part of a large proportion of teaching in a medical degree. We found, however, that students were reaching the end of their studies and telling us that they had not been “taught patient safety”. We also realised that students had not had any opportunity to rehearse clinical reporting systems and discuss with their peers some of the challenges around reporting errors and near misses. So we decided to develop a workshop for final year students in their assistantship block, to pull together their learning and discuss how this would apply to their FY1 posts. This has now run for two years and is embedded in our curriculum.

I am a patient as well as an educator and am aware that discussing one’s own traumatic experiences can have negative impacts on mental health and wellbeing. I believed it was vitally important to centre the session on patient stories, but without causing additional burden, which is why I decided to work with Care Opinion.

I read very many Care Opinion stories before deciding to use this one about an elderly woman who went through a series of near misses because of an initial poor clinical decision. I felt it was important to focus on skills and active learning in preparation for becoming a junior doctor so the session has a series of small group activities.

During the session, we split the students into groups and give each group a different tool with which to 'investigate' the episode—Fishbone, Root Cause Analysis, Human Factors, the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework and a SEIPS worksheet. We then come back together and discuss the findings, which are usually very similar between groups. 

We then discuss saying sorry (using this excellent patient video) and get the students to write a letter to the woman's daughter. 

Next, we look at reporting including using the Yellow Card system and Datix—we get the students to actually complete a form for the patient we have just investigated so that they have done it once before they may need to do it for real.

We finish the session by discussing student concerns about patient safety when they start work, and this has resulted in many useful conversations.

Students have fed back that the session really highlighted relevant issues: “I think the patient safety session was interesting to put so close to F1, as it highlighted a lot of the system issues with the NHS and how tough it will be.”

Related reading

Patient Safety Spotlight interview with James Munro, Chief Executive of Care Opinion

About the Author

Kate Owen is a Professor of Medical Education at Warwick Medical School and was a GP for over 20 years. Her interests include partnering with people with lived experience and students to develop the medical curriculum. Her own lived experience shapes her professional practice.