Background: Preventable medical errors are currently the third leading cause of death in the United States following heart disease and cancer (1). Because of this, patient safety has become an important concern for healthcare systems due to the high costs associated with medical errors as well as the impact on reputation and mortality and morbidity statistics. However, formal education on patient safety and preventable medical errors is often not implemented in the pre-clinical years of medical education and medical students do not learn about these until their third year of medical school.
Purpose: Incorporation of patient safety curriculum prior to clinical years may yield favorable results in clerkships and residency as these students will be adequately informed about the importance of patient safety. This study was designed to assess the effectiveness of earlier exposure and education during pre-clinical years and its impact on interest and knowledge about patient safety.
Description: A patient safety training was conducted for interested first and second-year medical students and responses were assessed through a pre-test and multiple post-tests, which were administered immediately after the training, at 3-months post-training, and at 6-months post-training. The survey assessed student knowledge on aspects of patient safety, identifying the correct course of action in different scenarios concerning patient safety, and a Likert scale assessing if the training influenced students’ desire to learn about patient safety. As part of the training, alongside presentations on patient safety, students were able to discuss real case scenarios and learn about clinical best practices in an interactive segment with physicians. RStudio was used to perform summary statistics on the categorical variables and chi-square tests to compare the scores between the pre- and post- tests.
Conclusions: Seventeen students completed the immediate post-test survey out of twenty-three participants. At this time, the data from the three-month and six-month follow-up are unavailable as that time period has not been met yet. Data showed improvement in students considering themselves to be well-versed in different aspects of patient safety (11.8% to 41.2%) in the pre- and post-training surveys. There was no change in responses between the surveys asking if students felt that the school’s curriculum adequately educated them on patient safety during preclinical years (23.5% to 23.5%). While there were no significant findings, the general trend of improvement in students who considered themselves to be knowledgeable about patient safety prior to the training to after is promising as it does show the effectiveness of the patient safety training. Additionally, there is only a small percentage of students who felt that the school’s curriculum educated them on patient safety, indicating a need to incorporate more patient safety into pre-clinical year curriculum that can be made mandatory for all students to attend. Patient safety is especially important when entering clerkship years and residency as the majority of medical errors occur while patients are in the hospital and students should be prepared to address any issues they see. The lack of significant findings can most likely be attributed to small sample size, which will improve as more of these training sessions are conducted and additional data is collected. The surveys for the 3 and 6-months timepoints will also yield important data to further this analysis.