Creating a Curriculum for Training Health Profession Faculty Leaders

Objectives: An interprofessional, collaborative group of educators, patient safety officers, and Federal program directors teamed up to create an integrated, patient safety-centered curriculum for the education of physicians, nurses, and other health professional faculty leaders. Methods: Executive and advisory committees became a collaborative team, surveying and cataloguing existing educational tools and materials. They synthesized materials about patient safety and interprofessional collaboration to provide faculty with tools for assessing and improving their current teaching practices that influence patient safety. Results: The curriculum consists of a modular handbook and linked train-the-trainer workshop exercises on the key theme: improving the culture of safety through improving interprofessional collaboration. Five topics structure the curriculum: Patient Safety Basics, Developing Academic Leadership, Improving the Culture of Practice, Changing the Response to Error, and Applied Principles of Interprofessional Teaching and Learning. Conclusions: One hundred thirty-seven faculty and staff educators from 9 States, representing 14 health professions, have used the curriculum through the workshop mode. Based on their estimates of the number of health professionals and students in their spheres of influence, they have the potential to influence more than 10,000 individuals in improving patient safety through interprofessional collaboration.