Patient safety: What are difference in Faculty and Medical students’ awareness about it?

Abstract

Objective: To explore the difference in awareness level of medical students and faculty about patient safety.

Methodology:  This qualitative descriptive exploratory research was conducted at Islamic International medical college Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Faculty having clinical as well as teaching experience and students of final year MBBS were included. WHO curriculum guideline on patient safety for undergraduate medical schools was used to prepare questions. Interviews of faculty and focus groups of students were used to collect data. Atlas-ti was used in the process of thematic analysis.

Results: Initially 43 open codes for faculty and 35 for students were made. They were reduced to 6 main themes with several subthemes by axial and selective coding. The themes were 1) Importance of patient safety education, 2) Importance of strong student-patient relationship, 3) Code of conduct, 4) Students and effective team, 5) Students part in management plans 6) Medical errors. The main difference was found in theme 1, where faculty was well aware with the definition and concept of patient safety, but students were not clear about medical errors. Another difference was found in theme 4, where students were only considering doctors as a part of effective team while the faculty had clear knowledge about role of other health professionals in this matter.

Conclusion: Students should be given adequate knowledge about definition, causes and remedy of medical errors, patient safety education and formation of an effective team through inclusion of these concepts in the curriculum. Faculty training is also needed along with curriculum reforms as the faculty is aware of these concepts but not transferring these effectively to students.