Perceived Benefit of Teaching Patient Safety to Pharmacy Students by Integrating Classroom Teaching With Introductory...

Ensuring a culture that prioritizes and implements patient safety requires educating all future health care professionals to prepare them for their active role in reducing medical errors. There is limited literature describing integration of patient safety education into the curriculum of health care professionals, including pharmacists. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the perceived benefit of integrating patient safety education into a pharmacy curriculum.

Second-year pharmacy students (P2s) completed a patient safety self-study, followed by in-class and experiential application of a root cause analysis (RCA). An electronic, anonymous postsurvey was administered to P2s and third-year pharmacy students (P3s) who had not had formal patient safety education.

Of the 310 students, 53% responded to the survey. Significantly more P2s reported more confidence to describe patient safety and its purpose ( P = .0092), describe factors that influence patient safety ( P = .0055), and conduct an RCA ( P < .001). P2s also reported significantly better ability to conduct a RCA compared to P3s (88.9% positive vs 58.7%, respectively; P ≤ .001).

Both classes perceived patient safety education to be valuable; however, formal education resulted in some significant improvements in perceived confidence and understanding, including ability to conduct an RCA.