gms | German Medical Science

Introduction: Currently, innovative approaches to teach patient safety and dealing with professional roles are rarely implemented, especially during medical students’ last year of education (practice year). Yet, medical students make significant and sustainable experiences in their first professional experiences in the clinic in terms of dealing with patient safety as well as conflicting professional roles.

ArHyPaRE is an established teaching project at University Hospital Bonn that combines topics of occupational safety and health, hygiene, patient safety, law and ethics. Currently, important competences of each subject are taught to medical students during their first four years of education. However, a respective course during their practice year is missing.

The aim of this project is to establish and test an innovative course for students in practical placements and expand the existing ArHyPaRE course format.

Methods: We present current status and ongoing revisions as well as respective, step-wise developments around the ArHyPaRE project with particular focus on its course for medical students in their first practice year. We particularly focus in our presentation on the preliminary design and first alignment. Drawing upon the recommendations and experiences of various stakeholders (i.e., students, lecturers, clinicians) as well as consistent with educational objectives (i.e., learning outcomes of the NKLM), we drafted a course for piloting and first practice implementation. Additionally and in order to develop a student-friendly format, we applied constrictive alignment to align learning activities with course objectives and learning outcome [1].

Results: We report first experiences around the development and practice implementation of our newly designed course format for medical students in their first year of clinical practice. Drawing upon a step-wise process as well as inclusion of various clinical and educational stakeholders at our University Hospital, we so fare drafted a course agenda and curriculum. It shall take account of the various experiences that medical students experience in their clinical practice as well as provides opportunities to reflect on their insights in a peer-support format. Nonetheless, several barriers as well as ongoing challenges for successful implementation are identified.

Discussion: In order to provide successful and effective learning experiences in their first practice year, medical students need to be supported in their learning through systematic and effective learning formats. We present a new course that shall facilitate student’s learning on physicians’ professional roles as well as dealing with challenges of patient safety, occupational safety, hygiene, and ethics during every day clinical practice. Current challenges, potential barriers as well as opportunities for transfer into other educational settings in medical teaching are discussed.