Unmet Needs: Teaching Physicians to Provide Safe Patient Care.
Medical schools face an urgent need to transform their curricula to emphasize patient safety, according to this report from the Lucian Leape Institute at the National Patient Safety Foundation. Based on a roundtable discussion among leading medical education and patient safety experts, this report concludes that the traditional curricular focus on medical knowledge and technical expertise must shift to incorporate key concepts in systems analysis and patient-centered care. The piece includes specific recommendations for medical school and academic medical center leadership to develop rigorous safety curricula and evaluation methods. The report also emphasizes the importance of a culture of safety in teaching hospitals, stressing that unprofessional behavior and authority gradients prevent students from reporting and learning from errors.