Medical Errors and Patient Safety Education: Views of Intern Doctors

Abstract

Medical errors and patient safety have become increasingly important in the area of medical research in the recent years. World health Organization and other international committees have long been recommending the early integration of education about errors and patient safety in undergraduate and graduate medical education. To integrate patient safety education into existing curriculum views of the doctors towards patient safety education is an important issue. This descriptive type of cross sectional study was carried out to explore the views of intern doctors regarding medical error and patient safety education in undergraduate medical education of Bangladesh. The study was carried out in seven (three public and four private) medical colleges of Bangladesh over a period from July 2014 to June 2015. Study population was 400 intern doctors. Data were collected by self-administered structured questionnaire. The existing curriculum was also reviewed to find out patient safety issues. The study revealed that the topic medical error and patient safety were mostly neglected in the curriculum. But the intern doctors had positive attitude towards patient safety education. A total of 84.8% of the intern doctors with a high average score of 4.24 agreed that teaching students about patient safety should be a priority in medical students training while 87.8% agreed that learning about patient safety before graduation from medical colleges would produce more effective doctors. Among the respondents 76.6% expected more training on patient safety. Almost half of the participants (52.3%) reported that they had been assigned to tasks for which they were not trained or where medical errors could have happened easily (57.5 %). From this study it can be concluded that, there was a distinct need for more education and training in the field of medical error and patient safety among the intern doctors.