Abstract:

The Brazilian Patient Safety Program (BPSP) is a program from the Ministry of Health launched in 2013. The main objective is to improve patient safety across all healthcare settings. One of the main program strategies is to include Patient Safety in education curriculums, including the education of professionals. We describe here a pioneer education project that was designed to deliver education in patient safety to healthcare professionals in Primary Health Care (PHC) in Brazil. Here we have to highlight that despite Brazil had previous patient safety projects, this is the first national project to focus solely on PHC. One of the challenges was to deliver this subject for the first time to healthcare professionals that are usually busy with activities related to patient care or administrative tasks. For this reason we decided from beginning to use active learning strategies during the whole process.

The project was developed in partnership with Brazilian Ministry of Health (via Institutional Development Program of the Brazilian National Health System - PROADI-SUS) and National Council of Health Secretaries and was executed by Hospital Moinhos de Vento, one of the five Brazilian excellence hospitals. PROADI-SUS is a Program of Brazilian Ministry of Health to work with Brazilian excellence hospitals to promote quality improvement in Brazilian National Health System.

The project, named "Training on patient safety in Primary Health Care", started in 2018 and is still active in 2020. In this period, 23 Brazilian federative units joined the project, corresponding 27 health regions in the country, receiving educational workshops on patient safety to healthcare professionals. The pedagogical workshops were interspersed with support in a virtual learning environment (VLE), with access to the repository of educational materials, participation in biweekly forums and monthly web conferences. The training on patient safety included the following topics: National Patient Safety Program, System Thinking, Human Factors, Patient Safety Culture, Patient Safety goals, Medication Safety, Diagnostic Safety, Transition of care, Learning from errors, Patient Engagement. The project aimed at adult education is based on the relational or constructivist pedagogy of building knowledge and learning, using active teaching methodologies, such as: gamification, problem-based learning, dramatization and project-based learning.

As results so far, there are the development of the workshop contents, the production of didactic material, the support in the VLE and the realization of the workshops. There were a total 27 2day’s long workshops with a total of 1044 participants, spread across the country, who act as multipliers in their workplace. The VLE obtained more than 4 thousand accesses to 15 thematic forums and 9 web conferences.

The Project is innovative, as it is an educational initiative for health professionals working in PHC, at a time when the theme is more consolidated and discussed in the hospital setting. Based on educational strategies, this is an initiative to train professionals in health management and care, providing opportunities to improve the quality of care offered by PHC in the country. In parallel to the training actions, the project encourages the creation of a sharing network (community of practices) on experiences related to patient safety and PHC.

Keywords:

Patient safety, primary health care, adult education.