Press Release
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University will jointly stage a patient safety training exercise for medical and nursing students on Tuesday, March 6.
The event, which marks a first of its kind collaboration between the two universities, will take place on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus. It is the first of four projects that is funded by a $1.65 million grant to UNC and Duke from the North Carolina GlaxoSmithKline Foundation, which was announced in February 2006.
“It is a truly collaborative project, involving both UNC and Duke and their respective schools of medicine and nursing,” said Dr. Cherri Hobgood, associate dean for curriculum and educational development in the UNC School of Medicine. “That has really never been done before.”
On March 6, 460 medical and nursing students will participate, along with more than 100 UNC and Duke faculty and staff. The day will begin with an introductory session and lecture in UNC’s Medical Biomolecular Research Building. The larger group will then be broken into smaller groups for patient safety instruction and training. Four different modalities or methods of instruction will be used, to help the organizers evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each.
One group will receive a traditional lecture. A second group will receive a lecture and also will be asked, via an audience response system, how to respond to particular patient care situations. A third group will take part in a “low fidelity” patient care simulation, in which they are assembled into patient care teams and engage in role playing. The fourth group will use a “high fidelity” simulation, in which students put on white coats and/or scrubs and take care of a “smart mannequin” that mimics human physiological responses to the actions taken by the students. Each group will be tested after completing their instruction.
The day-long exercise is a pilot study for the organizers, who will use the results to develop a new curriculum component that will be included in the fourth year of the UNC and Duke medical school programs.
Hobgood was in charge of planning and executing UNC’s role in the event. Her counterpart at Duke is Dr. Karen Frush, chief patient safety officer for the Duke University Health System.
The North Carolina GlaxoSmithKline Foundation grant to UNC and Duke established a collaborative partnership to address four pressing local and global health care concerns: quality of care and patient safety, health disparities, global health with an emphasis on HIV/AIDS, and mental health care.
The collaboration pools the resources of UNC’s schools of Medicine and Public Health, Duke University Medical Center and Duke’s Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy to design and implement educational and research initiatives that promise long-term public health improvements in each of the four areas. It is under the direction of principal investigators Dr. Victor J. Dzau, Duke’s chancellor for health affairs and president and chief executive officer of the Duke University Health System; and Dr. William L. Roper, UNC’s vice chancellor for medical affairs, UNC Health Care’s chief executive officer, and dean of the UNC School of Medicine.
Originally posted here