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Undergraduate medical students’ attitudes towards medical errors and patient safety: a multi-center cross-sectional study in the Gaza Strip, Palestine
BACKGROUND: In undergraduate medical education, patient safety concepts and understanding of medical errors are under-represented. This problem is more evident in low-income settings. The aim of this study was to explore undergraduate medical students’ attitudes towards patient safety in the low-inc...
Autores principales: | , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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BioMed Central
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7678054/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33213439 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12909-020-02375-z |
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author | Alser, Mohammed Böttcher, Bettina Alfaqawi, Maha Jlambo, Abdallah Abuzubaida, Walaa Abu-El-Noor, Nasser |
author_facet | Alser, Mohammed Böttcher, Bettina Alfaqawi, Maha Jlambo, Abdallah Abuzubaida, Walaa Abu-El-Noor, Nasser |
author_sort | Alser, Mohammed |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: In undergraduate medical education, patient safety concepts and understanding of medical errors are under-represented. This problem is more evident in low-income settings. The aim of this study was to explore undergraduate medical students’ attitudes towards patient safety in the low-income setting of the Gaza Strip. METHODS: A cross-sectional, descriptive study included medical students of the two medical schools in the Gaza Strip with 338 medical students completing the Attitudes to Patient Safety Questionnaire-IV (APSQ-IV), which examines patient attitudes in 29 items over 10 domains. Results are represented as means ± standard deviations for each item and domain as well as percentage of positive responses to specific items. RESULTS: Medical students reported slightly positive patient safety attitudes (4.7 ± 0.5 of 7) with the most positive attitudes in the domains of situational awareness, importance of patient safety in the curriculum, error inevitability and team functioning. While no negative attitudes were reported, neutral attitudes were found in the domains of professional incompetence as a cause of error and error reporting confidence. Study year and gender had no significant association with patient safety attitudes, except for disclosure responsibility, where male students displayed significantly more positive attitudes. The study university was significantly associated with three of the 10 examined domains, all of which involved understanding of medical errors, for which students of University 2 (who had undergone limited patient safety training) held significantly more positive attitudes, compared with students of University 1 (who did not have structured patient safety training). CONCLUSION: Medical students’ patient safety attitudes were very similar among students from both universities, except for understanding of medical error, for which students, who had received structured training in this topic, displayed significantly more positive attitudes. This underlines the power of the ‘hidden curriculum’, where students adjust to prevalent cultures in local hospitals, while they do their clinical training. Furthermore, it highlights the need for a systematic inclusion of patient safety content in local undergraduate curricula. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7678054 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | BioMed Central |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-76780542020-11-20 Undergraduate medical students’ attitudes towards medical errors and patient safety: a multi-center cross-sectional study in the Gaza Strip, Palestine Alser, Mohammed Böttcher, Bettina Alfaqawi, Maha Jlambo, Abdallah Abuzubaida, Walaa Abu-El-Noor, Nasser BMC Med Educ Research Article BACKGROUND: In undergraduate medical education, patient safety concepts and understanding of medical errors are under-represented. This problem is more evident in low-income settings. The aim of this study was to explore undergraduate medical students’ attitudes towards patient safety in the low-income setting of the Gaza Strip. METHODS: A cross-sectional, descriptive study included medical students of the two medical schools in the Gaza Strip with 338 medical students completing the Attitudes to Patient Safety Questionnaire-IV (APSQ-IV), which examines patient attitudes in 29 items over 10 domains. Results are represented as means ± standard deviations for each item and domain as well as percentage of positive responses to specific items. RESULTS: Medical students reported slightly positive patient safety attitudes (4.7 ± 0.5 of 7) with the most positive attitudes in the domains of situational awareness, importance of patient safety in the curriculum, error inevitability and team functioning. While no negative attitudes were reported, neutral attitudes were found in the domains of professional incompetence as a cause of error and error reporting confidence. Study year and gender had no significant association with patient safety attitudes, except for disclosure responsibility, where male students displayed significantly more positive attitudes. The study university was significantly associated with three of the 10 examined domains, all of which involved understanding of medical errors, for which students of University 2 (who had undergone limited patient safety training) held significantly more positive attitudes, compared with students of University 1 (who did not have structured patient safety training). CONCLUSION: Medical students’ patient safety attitudes were very similar among students from both universities, except for understanding of medical error, for which students, who had received structured training in this topic, displayed significantly more positive attitudes. This underlines the power of the ‘hidden curriculum’, where students adjust to prevalent cultures in local hospitals, while they do their clinical training. Furthermore, it highlights the need for a systematic inclusion of patient safety content in local undergraduate curricula. BioMed Central 2020-11-19 /pmc/articles/PMC7678054/ /pubmed/33213439 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12909-020-02375-z Text en © The Author(s) 2020 Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Alser, Mohammed Böttcher, Bettina Alfaqawi, Maha Jlambo, Abdallah Abuzubaida, Walaa Abu-El-Noor, Nasser Undergraduate medical students’ attitudes towards medical errors and patient safety: a multi-center cross-sectional study in the Gaza Strip, Palestine |
title | Undergraduate medical students’ attitudes towards medical errors and patient safety: a multi-center cross-sectional study in the Gaza Strip, Palestine |
title_full | Undergraduate medical students’ attitudes towards medical errors and patient safety: a multi-center cross-sectional study in the Gaza Strip, Palestine |
title_fullStr | Undergraduate medical students’ attitudes towards medical errors and patient safety: a multi-center cross-sectional study in the Gaza Strip, Palestine |
title_full_unstemmed | Undergraduate medical students’ attitudes towards medical errors and patient safety: a multi-center cross-sectional study in the Gaza Strip, Palestine |
title_short | Undergraduate medical students’ attitudes towards medical errors and patient safety: a multi-center cross-sectional study in the Gaza Strip, Palestine |
title_sort | undergraduate medical students’ attitudes towards medical errors and patient safety: a multi-center cross-sectional study in the gaza strip, palestine |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7678054/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33213439 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12909-020-02375-z |
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