Boston Medical Center creates patient safety toolkit

With a new multimedia toolkit, Boston Medical Center (BMC) aims to make learning about patient safety in the hospital setting more concrete, relevant and accessible to as wide an audience as possible.

The toolkit, OK to Proceed? What Every Healthcare ProviderShould Know About Patient Safety, is anchored by an illustrated book thataddresses contributing factors and downstream impacts of patient safety. Butwith a flexible format and accompanying videos, its creators hope it will beappropriate and useful for people with different learning styles and levels ofexperience, including patients.

Recognizing that “we have a new generation of learners whoare accustomed to succinct, media-rich materials,” Rafael Ortega, M.D.,co-editor of the toolkit and chair of Anesthesiology and professor at BMC andBoston University School of Medicine, explains that learners can use elementsof the toolkit at their own pace, tailored to their needs, from first-yearmedical students to teams of practicing clinicians and others interested inpatient safety. Interdisciplinary collaboration was also a guiding principlefor the project, which had more than 90 contributors.

It consists of a 350-page paperback text with numerous illustrations and QR codes that link to animations and video case studies. Some elements are also available on a dedicated website, where the full toolkit may be purchased. Each of the book’s 52 chapters is being released on the website, one per week, through 2019 in a series called Weekly Dose.