Designing a patient safety undergraduate medical curriculum: the Telluride Interdisciplinary Roundtable experience.
OBJECTIVE
Patient safety has emerged as a global concern in the provision of quality health care, and yet, to date, few medical schools have created and/or implemented patient safety curricula. The purpose of this article is to introduce readers to one model of a patient safety undergraduate medical curriculum, as designed by a group of experts attending an annual interdisciplinary roundtable assembled for this purpose.


CONCLUSIONS
The Annual Telluride Interdisciplinary Roundtable met in 2005 and 2006 to design what it considered to be a comprehensive patient safety curriculum for medical students. Invited members included stakeholders from a variety of fields, including health care providers, senior health care administration, students, residents, patient advocacy leaders, and curriculum development/assessment experts. The group developed a list of general curricular principles, followed by 11 specific elements felt to be essential to an effective patient safety curriculum for undergraduate medical education students. It also identified a number of challenges to implementing such a curriculum.


CONCLUSIONS
A patient safety curriculum, developed by a group of experts for an undergraduate medical education population, was successfully developed over a two-year period of time. Future meetings of the Telluride Roundtable group have centered on evaluation and refinement of these curricular elements as pilots occur in a number of medical schools, and new curricular ideas continue to be developed. Continued interprofessional dialogue and collaborative research will enable the development and implementation of a standardized longitudinal patient safety student curriculum.
Mayer
David
D
Institute for Patient Safety Excellence, University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine, Chicago, Illinois 60612, USA. dmayer1@uic.edu
Klamen
Debra L
DL
Gunderson
Anne
A
Barach
Paul
P
D003479:Curriculum; D004504:Education, Medical, Undergraduate; D006801:Humans; D033183:Interdisciplinary Communication; D019300:Medical Errors / Q000517:prevention & control; D016730:Program Development; D017751:Safety Management