Teaching Patient Safety at the Bedside

Cohort: 2017
Fellow: Chris Moriates

Creating a culture of patient safety in teaching hospitals results in safer care delivery. The many demands of the current clinical learning environment make it challenging to routinely and effectively include bedside teaching and role-modeling of patient safety. We used a “positive deviance” model, which has been applied in various settings to help change cultural practices, to identify clinical faculty who model and teach patient safety principles during direct patient care. We sought nominations annually from learners and faculty for “Patient Safety Teaching Champions,” who were then selected and provided a public award. In addition, these awardees were invited to join a longitudinal learning community, convening 4-5 times for 90-minute weekly meetings, which employed Experiential Learning and critical reflection to identify attitudes and behaviors faculty utilized to teach and role-model patient safety. Faculty also observed these participants during routine clinical teaching and provided feedback and reinforcement of effective patient safety teaching methods. Ninety-two percent of participants from the first two cohorts agreed that the learning community meetings helped to prepare them to better teach patient safety at the bedside and that they learned new teaching strategies. In 2020, we are currently running our fourth cohort of Patient Safety Teaching Champions at Dell Medical School.