Patient safety workshop

Hello! I'm Kate Owen, Director of Medical Studies at Warwick Medical School. I thought I'd share with you how we used a CO story as a basis for a Patient Safety workshop.

I was browsing stories when I came across this one https://www.careopinion.org.uk/882398  which describes the care of an older adult following a fall. Immediately it struck me that it was full of such rich content for medical students to learn about patient safety.

I used the story as a springboard to develop a patient safety workshop for final year medical students during their assistantship block (the last block before they graduate) to pull together everything they had learnt during the course and help them reflect on how they would manage patient safety when out working as doctors in the NHS. It was really important to me that the patients perspective was at the centre of the session as I believe this helps students to appreciate the human impact of events.

We used the story in the following ways:

Identified patient safety issues, ranked them and compared them with national rating scales.

Investigated the experience described using a variety of methods including root cause analysis, fishbone, human factors and NHS tools.

Wrote a response to the story- and compared it with the actual response.

Completed a datix form for the incident.

Discussed how we would manage a similar situation in practice.

The session was facilitated by a mix of health professionals & lay people.

I thought I'd share with you one (my favourite!) of the students flip-charts which demonstrates the engagement with the session and some of the learning. 

Happy to share resources: contact me at katherine.owen@warwick.ac.uk