Abstract:

Project-based On-line training is shown to be a very efficient tool within the healthcare environment. One of the key objectives of the Spanish Patient Safety Strategy, promoted by the Ministry of Health, is to improve professionals’ knowledge, skills and attitudes in risk management. For this reason, an On-line training course in Risk Management (RM) 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. This course, accredited by the Spanish Ministry of Health, has been oriented for managers and clinical professionals grouped in 3-4 people teams linked professionally. The teams have to develop a project on their working area, under the guidance and continuous support of a panel of PS expert tutors.15 ONLINE course editions that have been completed by 900 health professionals from Spain, Latin-America , Europe and other countries around the world (in collaboration with European Community, World Health Organization and Pan-American Health Organization).

The ONLINE course, hosted on a e-learning 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). It 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.

A WEB-database has been designed in order to store projects-data, enable further analysis and provide free access to all healthcare professionals interested in Patient Safety. 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.

The level of satisfaction expressed by the students on the quality survey has been encouraging high. Most valued aspects of the course were: the materials, methodology, communication with the tutorial team, overall goal achievement and job usefulness.
Additional key success factors for this course are:
- The projects are carried out in teams and this empowers the interdisciplinary vision of the patient safety and promotes the spreading of a patient safety culture.
- Being this course a project-oriented one (within the context of the healthcare setting of the students), the students become highly motivated to carry out the exercises.
- Active role of the course coordinator as a facilitator, whenever obstacles are found by the students, and also to remind upcoming due dates.
- Broad experience and prestige of the tutorial team in the different fields covered in the course.

A collaborative project is being launched to localize this ONLINE course in developing countries. Teams of health care professionals from India, Peru, Kenya and Spain are collaborating to redesign course contents (examples, cases, etc) and methodology to make it ready to be locally used in developing countries.

Keywords:

Online training, patient safety, risk management, project based learning.