Abstract:

The Teaching Programme (TP) of the Spanish Patient Safety Strategy uses a multi-faceted methodology in order to promote the patient safety culture at national level.
One of the key objectives of this programme is to improve professionals’ knowledge, skills and attitudes in risk management. For this reason, an On-line training course in Risk Management (RMC) and patient safety (PS) improvement, that combine reactive and proactive approaches to Patient Safety Improvement, was specifically designed and included in an electronic platform of the TP.
The platform has been developed with all the appropriate tools necessary to allow the participants: To know at any time their progression, communicate, and exchange all the information required with the group of expert tutors (which provide continued support).
The RMC includes theoretical contents on the RM processes and practical RM tools clearly detailed with examples and practical cases, through templates and clear formats, to allow their implementation in different health organizations.
This 120 hours course is aimed to manager and clinical professionals, grouped in 3-4 people teams linked professionally in order to finally develop a PS improvement project on their working area. The Project consists of a set of 16 steps where professionals use the methodology and tools provided in the course, and contextualize them on their healthcare unit/area.
A database has been designed in order to analyze the projects and provide access-free to all professionals interested in PS. Reports can be produced by using different filters (field, area, type of health-care centre, unit, PS topic, PS management tool, etc). For both, access and ad-hoc query to get the reports, a WEB interface is used.
With the data retrieved from 150 projects up to date by more than 700 professionals, an analysis has been carried out in order to identify, according to the specialists from each of the areas studied, which are the most relevant risks, and which are the most efficient actions to manage and prevent them.

The course is accredited by the Spanish Ministry of Health.

Results:
In the period of 2005-2008 a total of 10 RMC editions have been completed with the participation of 600 health professionals from 18 Spanish Health Regions (HR) and 120 from 7 Latin- American countries.
The level of satisfaction expressed by the students on the quality survey has been very high (4,4 on a 5 points scale). Most valued aspects of the course were: the materials (intuitive and easy to understand) and communication with the tutorial team (high clarity and technical quality comments).
For the health areas and PS topics studied in the ONLINE course projects, a Database has been developed that summarizes the use of the use of the different RM tools.
As a result from the analysis of the PS improvement projects loaded into the Database, a good practices report has been generated, which summarizes which are the most relevant risks by healthcare area and by PS topic and, according to the professionals of each of these areas, the most efficient actions to prevent them.
For 2009, six calls of the course are being carried out, including the first two English editions in collaboration with the European Community and the World Health Organization (WHO)

Keywords:

online course, patient safety, risk management, project based learning.