Table 1 Kern’s six step approach for curriculum development, background and actions taken

Problem identification and general needs assessment

• Patient safety concerns is a serious and global health care problem

• Future health care professionals need knowledge and skills to make them able to predict and deal with the risks surrounding a complex healthcare society

• AMEE recommends that patient safety education should be integrated in the education of undergraduate medical students

• The University decides to develop a patient safety curriculum

• A 1-day mandatory course is to be developed and conducted in the regional simulation center

Targeted needs assessment

• WHO provides a comprehensive curriculum guide for medical schools

• We adapted the curriculum to local context based on discussions with patient safety experts and focus group interviews with a total of 20 medical students.

• The interview guide covered

o What is patient safety?

o Learning from errors to prevent harm

o Understanding and managing clinical risks

• The transcripts were analyzed and the most important subjects for patient safety were leadership, communication and teamwork

Goals and objectives

• The overall goal was to bring medical students´ technical and non-technical skills to a level thar could increase patient safety

• The learning objectives were grounded in the WHO curriculum and the needs analysis. The content of the course is seen in Table 2.

Educational strategies

• Pre- course material

• Interactive learning methods

• Online video presentations

• Workshops

• Role playing

• Simulation-based training and debriefing

Implementation

• The course is mandatory

• It is implemented in the 4th year at the beginning of the medical students´ internal medicine/surgical internship

• A total of 58 courses have been conducted from 2016 to 2020

• The number of course participants are 2,226

Evaluation and feedback

• Evaluation of the course is part of the evaluation of the full patient safety curriculum

• Verbal evaluation and questionnaire at the end of the day

• Interview with peer teachers