Medical Errors

Learning Objectives

Upon completing this course you’ll be able to:

Chapter 1: Medical Errors: The Scope of the Problem

  1. Describe the scope of the medical errors problems and cite statistics showing public concern about the quality of health care.
  2. Define and identify various types of medical errors.
  3. List five steps a patient can take for safer health care.

Chapter 2: 20 Tips to Help Prevent Medical Errors

  1. Describe what a patient can do to avoid medical errors.

Chapter 3: Helpful Hints for Preventing Medication Errors

  1. Identify 4 ways to minimize errors.
  2. Make a list of “high-alert" medications.
  3. List and review target procedures commonly associated with medication errors.

Chapter 4: Improving Medication Safety

  1. Identify 10 common sources of error.
  2. Describe successful practices for improving medication safety.

Chapter 5: Reducing Errors in Health Care

  1. Describe how errors occur in health-care delivery steps.
  2. Describe various measures that can be taken to improve patient safety.
  3. Implement recommendations for identifying and learning from errors in pediatrics.

Chapter 6: Root Cause Analysis

  1. Describe the application of root cause analysis in medicine and outline its significant methodological limitations.

Chapter 7: Fatigue, Sleepiness, and Medical Errors

  1. Explain the effects of sleep debt.
  2. Explain the deleterious effect of night shifts and shift rotation on performance.
  3. Recite studies that have documented the impact of fatigue on medical personnel performance.
  4. Describe the impact of direction and speed of rotation of shift work on worker fatigue.

Evaluation of Individual Objectives

To assess the effectiveness of the course material, we ask that you evaluate your achievement of each learning objective on a scale of A to D (A=excellent, B=good, C=fair, D=unsatisfactory). Please indicate your responses next to each learning objective and return it to us with your completed exam.