Patient Safety Education Among Chinese Medical Undergraduates: An Empirical Study

Patient safety education is conducive to medical students' cognition on patient safety and to improvement of medical quality and safety. Developing patient safety education for medical students is more and more widely recognized by World Health Organization and countries all over the world. However, in China, patient safety courses aiming at medical students are relatively few, and there are few reports about the effect of patient safety courses. This paper explored the influence of patient safety curriculum on medical students' attitude to and knowledge of patient safety. The patient safety curriculum was carried out for 2011-grade undergraduates of Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology. The students participated in the class according to free choice. After the curriculum, the information of gender, major, attended course, attitude toward patient safety, and knowledge of laws and regulations of the 2011-grade undergraduates were collected. After rejecting invalid questionnaires, the number of undergraduates that participated in the survey was 112 (61 students did not take part in the curriculum; 51 took part in). Chi-square test was applied to analyze patient safety education's influence on medical students' attitude to patient safety and their knowledge mastery situation. The influence of patient safety education on the attitude of medical students to patient safety was not significant, but that on their knowledge of patient safety was remarkable. No matter male or female, as compared with medical students who had not accepted patient safety education, they both had a better acquisition of knowledge after having this education (for male students: 95% CI, 4.556-106.238, P<0.001; for female students: 95% CI, 3.183-33.238, P<0.001). Students majoring in Western Medicine had a relatively better mastery of knowledge of patient safety after receiving patient safety education (95% CI, 6.267-76.271, P<0.001). Short-term patient safety education cannot change medical students' stereotyped cognition on matters related to patient safety, but it can effectively enhance their knowledge of laws and regulations of patient safety.