There are challenges of teaching junior doctors on patient safety. For junior doctors, particularly interns, those at the start of their professional career, found it difficult to identify with patient safety as a discipline, so they did not prioritize it. In part this was because those with little clinical experience found it hard to relate to patient safety when presented as an abstract academic concept. The lack of explicit focus on patient safety was an obstacle, as was competition for interns’ attention from other aspects of their busy clinical duties.
Junior doctors responded positively to several ways of learning patient safety. These include: (1) learning from patients, particularly through patients’ stories. Story-telling is an effective form of communication. (2) Learning from medical errors and adverse events, and applying tools such as root cause analysis to identify lessons that could be learnt from them. Real-life incidents capture the attention of interns and junior doctors instantly. Complicated incidents and lessons learnt can be illustrated with a combination of images, audio and movement in an animated story. Animated stories present heavy content in a refreshing and interesting way, make learning engaging and interactive for contemporary doctors. (3) Integrating safety teaching into clinical placements, with an explicit focus on patient safety, offer to interns’ actual or simulation training module.
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