Message from Professor Bruce Barraclough
It is vital for all health care professionals to understand the relevance of patient safety in their work and what they can do to improve the safety of care. However, most educational and pre-service training curricula for these professionals do not include patient safety.
It is for this reason that WHO's Patient Safety programme has developed the Patient Safety Curriculum Guide: Multi-professional Edition, which iscurrently being validated by experts in health-care professionals' education and patient safety. This edition is based on the Curriculum Guide for Medical Schools which was issued by WHO in 2009. The multi-professional edition, which captures expertise from the disciplines of dentistry, midwifery, medicine, nursing and pharmacy, seeks to fill the gap in patient safety education by providing a comprehensive curriculum designed to build knowledge and skills for students in these disciplines to better prepare them to delivering safer care, once qualified.
Encouraging univeristies and schools teaching these disciplines to incorporate the WHO Patient Safety Curriculum Guide in their curricula will contribute to greater awareness and understanding of patient safety amongst students. Our mission for the next years is to encourage widespread use of the WHO Curriculum Guide and the spread of patient safety teaching to all those involved in delivering care.
Professor Bruce Barraclough
Clinical Lead and Chair of the WHO Patient Safety Curriculum Guide