Project Summary 

Background 

Despite evidence showing that quality safety education and training is effective and vital to improving patient safety, the translation and wider adoption of new training programmes has been slow. In addition, many senior clinicians have never been exposed to this type of training, and the lack of senior faculty is seen as a key reason for the lack of adoption. Similarly, Foundation trainees - junior doctors at the very start of their careers - are an underused resource for driving patient safety improvement efforts. Our comprehensive “Lessons Learnt Programme” was developed to tackle these challenges. We developed, implemented and evaluated this novel patient safety training programme to promote Foundation trainees’ ability to learn and take appropriate action following a patient safety incident. This involved training over one hundred consultants as patient safety faculty, which will enable long-term sustainability of the programme (Ahmed et al., BMJ Qual Saf 2013). The Lessons Learnt Programme has now been taken up by over 28 hospitals across the UK and has trained over 2,000 foundation year doctors (Ahmed et al., BMJ Qual Saf 2014), winning the BMJ Award for Excellence in Education, and it has been highly commended by the HSJ. 

Outputs 

1. Ahmed M, Arora S, Baker P, Hayden J, Vincent C, Sevdalis N. Building capacity and capability for patient safety education: a train-the-trainers programme for senior doctors. BMJ Qual Saf. 2013 Aug;22(8):618-25.
2. Ahmed M, Arora S, Tier S, Hayden J, Sevdalis N, Vincent C, Baker P. Building a safer foundation: the Lessons Learnt patient safety training programme. BMJ Qual Saf. 2014 Jan;23(1):78-86.