Changing The Culture In Medical Education To Teach Patient Safety

In 1999 a seminal Institute of Medicine report estimated that preventable medical errors accounted for 44,000-98,000 patient deaths annually in U. S. hospitals. In response to this problem, the nation's medical schools, teaching hospitals, and health systems recognized that achieving greater patient safety requires more than a brief course in an already crowded medical school curriculum. It requires a fundamental culture change across all phases of medical education. This includes graduate medical education, which is already teaching the next generation of physicians to approach patient safety in a new way. In this paper the authors explore five factors critical to transforming the culture for patient safety and reflect on one real-world example at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine.