Evaluation of the efficiency of an educational program on medical errors and patient safety

Background The success of incident reporting in improving safety will depend on the awareness of the personnel about medical errors. To improve patient safety, we organised a 1/2-day program including a plenary session and a small group discussion on a multidisciplinary analysis of a case-study with a fishbone diagram. Purpose The purpose of the study was to evaluate the training efficiency on attitudes and beliefs of the personnel on patient safety and their attitudes towards the voluntary reporting of incidents. Material and Methods All the frontline healthcare professionals were invited to participate. Knowledge, attitudes and beliefs were measured by a 7-question survey at the beginning and end of the program. We calculated the mean training efficiency gain, which is defined as the ratio of the raw gain/maximal possible gain and the correlation between the knowledge gain and the global satisfaction of the program. Results The 1/2-day program was attended by 590 frontline healthcare professionals. Completed surveys were returned by 464 (79%) participants. The overall questions scores increased significantly from a pre-test mean of 6.5+/-1.4 to a post-test mean of 8.3+/-0.9. All the questions changed in the expected direction with mean training efficiency gain of 45.9% (38.0 to 53.4%). There was a positive correlation between the knowledge gain and the global satisfaction (r=0.215, p<0.001). Conclusion These findings documented the positive impact of the program, on knowledge, attitudes and beliefs of the personnel about medical errors and patient safety. They were especially impressive given that the program entailed only 1/2 day’s effort. Longitudinal follow-up is required to provide more information on the lasting impact of the module.