Changing the culture in medical education to teach patient safety

Abstract

In 1999 a seminal Institute of Medicine report estimated that preventable medical errors accounted for 44,000-98,000 patient deaths annually in U.S. hospitals. In response to this problem, the nation's medical schools, teaching hospitals, and health systems recognized that achieving greater patient safety requires more than a brief course in an already crowded medical school curriculum. It requires a fundamental culture change across all phases of medical education. This includes graduate medical education, which is already teaching the next generation of physicians to approach patient safety in a new way. In this paper the authors explore five factors critical to transforming the culture for patient safety and reflect on one real-world example at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine.