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Patient safety is a serious global public health issue. Estimates show that in developed countries as many as one in 10 patients is harmed while receiving hospital care. In developing countries, the probability of patients being harmed in hospitals is higher than in industrialized nations. The risk of health care-associated infection in some developing countries is as much as 20 times higher than in developed countries. Source: WHO.Int
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Johns Hopkins Medicine
- The Science of Safety in Healthcare – Johns Hopkins School of Nursing – This course will introduce the basic principles of the science of safety in healthcare. Course content will be of relevance to members of the healthcare delivery team, including nurses, as well as the healthcare consumers in the general public.
University Of Miami
- Nursing and Patient Safety – University of Miami School of Nursing – The WHO Collaborating Centre for Nursing Human Resources Development and Patient Safety has completed the one-year piloting phase of the Nursing and Patient Safety free on-line course, developed by our WHO Collaborating Centre in collaboration with the Pan American Health Organization and the International Network for Nursing and Patient Safety (RIENSEP).
HCCS Effective Compliance Solutions
- Patient Safety – HCCS – This course covers national patient safety training goals and initiatives, as well as common medical errors now endangering your patients. It also covers sentinel-event reporting, error-analysis and reporting, plus continual improvement planning and doing.
- Reducing Medication Errors – HCCS – This courseware covers error-statistics and common types of medication errors, recommendations for reducing errors and the key elements of med-management policies and procedures. It also covers the nurse’s preventive role, critical questions to ask patients and tips from the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality (AHRQ).
- Bioterrorism and Disaster Preparation – HCCS – This course educates all staff on various types of disasters and the “environment of care” and how it is affected by disasters. It explains accreditation requirements for a Disaster/Emergency Plan and what to expect during a disaster drills. The Bioterrorism Medication Errors reviews the steps for responding to different types of disasters, the 4 phases of disaster management and reviews the roles and responsibilities of staff members.
- Infection Control – HCCS – This course covers the transmission of infectious organisms, the four conditions needed for an infection to spread, Joint Commission-mandated risk-reducing standards, and infection control during construction projects. The HCCS Infection Control course also educates staff about the transmission and control of blood-borne pathogens such as Hepatitis B and C and HIV and airborne pathogens such as Influenza and Tuberculosis.
- Organizational Performance Improvement – HCCS- This course covers the importance of performance improvement (PI) and the Plan, Do, Check, and Act model (PDCA). It also covers other PI models and sample measurement tools, plus sample PI projects.
- Competency for Quality Care – HCCS – This courseware covers the Joint Commission’s competency standards, plus ongoing competence assessment and training. It covers the following competency areas: diverse patient populations, communication barriers, patient age-related care delivery mandates, emotionally and psychologically-disturbed patients, equipment use and maintenance technique, plus diversity and sensitivity in the workplace.
- Patient Rights – HCCS – This course covers patient rights for advance directives, informed consent, privacy and ethical care delivery. It reviews the Patient Bill of Rights and HIPAA-mandated rights, exceptions to a patient’s privacy right, plus rights enforcement.
- Patient Education – HCCS – The courseware covers patient education’s role in improving outcomes and patient satisfaction, plus Joint Commission patient-education standards. It also covers teaching topics such as patient responsibilities and rights as well as disease-specific education and support. In addition, this course covers the assessment of individual patient-education needs and potential barriers such as cognitive/physical impairments, language barriers and cultural or religious values, and trains staff on how to educate patients.
- Documentation for Quality Care – HCCS – This course educates staff on the best practices for medical documentation and reviews The Joint Commission documentation standards. The HCCS Documentation for Quality Care course also covers accurate and complete documentation for care continuity, plus it outlines the legal aspects of documentation.
The Empowered Patient Coalition
- What is Patient Safety? An Overview for Patients – The Empowered Patient Coalition – – What is patient safety all about? How can I help keep myself and my loved ones safe during medical treatment? These are the basic questions that patients need and want answered. In this course, you will learn how patient safety is defined and about the efforts of early patient advocates to improve healthcare quality.
- Patient Safety Basics – The Empowered Patient Coalition – In this lesson, you will be introduced to the basic terms used in patient safety discussions and be given a link to find a complete listing of additional definitions. We will discuss the risks facing patients as determined by recent research and how much depends on a health care system that is safe and effective.
- The First Steps in Your Patient Safety Journey – The Empowered Patient Coalition – In this lesson, we discuss the value of researching your symptoms and diagnosis and provide links to leading sources of information. It is important to think about people you can enlist as your advocates if you become ill or hospitalized and to know what things to consider when making your decision. A patient journal is a tool to use to track the progress of your medical care and to organize your questions and concerns.
- Who’s Who? The Hospital Hierarchy – The Empowered Patient Coalition -Reading name tags gives you a starting point but you need to know more than your providers’ names and titles. The definitions included in this lesson help clarify the roles of the people caring for you in the hospital and the organizational charts provide a basic outline of the chain of command.We’ll show you why it is vital to understand the role of each person and the way your providers work together to keep you on the road to recovery.
- Who Do You Call? Getting Help In A Hospital – The Empowered Patient Coalition – patients and their advocates are often unaware of the many resources that hospitals have available to assist them. Do you want someone to run interference between you and the medical staff and schedule a family meeting? you will learn to understand the type of assistance each staff member can provide you.
- Rapid Response Teams – The Empowered Patient Coalition – A Rapid Response Team (RRT) is an important safety resource for hospital patients and their advocates. The Rapid Response Team may have different names in different hospitals, including Medical Emergency Team or MET. A Rapid Response Team is a group of hospital staff members who respond to the bedside at the early signs of a serious decline in the patient’s health.
World Health Organization
- Patient Safety Research: Introductory Course – World Health Organization – Hundreds of thousands of patients are harmed or die each year due to unsafe care, or get injured inadvertently when seeking health care. Understanding the magnitude of the problem in hospitals and primary care facilities is the first step towards improving patient safety.
- The Multi-professional Patient Safety Curriculum Guide – World Health Organization -The Multi-professional Patient Safety Curriculum Guide released by WHO promotes the need for patient safety education. The comprehensive guide assists universities and schools in the fields of dentistry, medicine, midwifery, nursing and pharmacy to teach patient safety. It also supports the training of all healthcare professionals on priority patient safety concepts and practices.
- Learning from Error – World Health Organization – Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the concept of root cause analysis.Chapter 2 is a dramatized incident of how a series of errors led to the incorrect administration of vincristine. Chapters 3-8 analyse the drama in the light of five factors that can reduce error in health care.
- Clean Care is Safer Care – World Health Organization – WHO Patient Safety team has provided a suite of tools to support health-care facilities in implementing a multimodal strategy in order to improve hand hygiene practices among healthcare workers.
- Safe Surgery Saves Lives – World Health Organization – The goal of the Safe Surgery Saves Lives Challenge is to improve the safety of surgical care around the world by ensuring adherence to proven standards of care in all countries. The WHO Surgical Safety Checklist (above) has improved compliance with standards and decreased complications from surgery in eight pilot hospitals where is was evaluated.
The Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health
- Quality Improvement and Patient Safety – The Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health – The RCPCH is launching an important new series of education courses on Quality Improvement and Patient Safety. The series offers a range of training for all child health practitioners interested in encouraging quality improvement.This is the first in the series and is designed to recruit and train RCPCH QI&PS Facilitators to effectively deliver training within their own organisations and regions.
