Holly Burt <haburt@uic.edu> is the primary instructor for this course. Additional instructors include Sheila Snow-Croft, Arpita Bose, and Michelle Eberle.

Course Description: This interactive seminar focuses on ways medical librarians can become more involved in the patient safety processes and activities within their institutions and organizations. Topics include understanding the issues of patient safety; locating where patient safety practices exist within the institution; and identifying patient safety resources for health professionals, for administration and staff, and for patients and families. Focused for hospital librarians, these four hours of lecture, discussion and brainstorming help librarians become effective agents for improving patient safety.

Agenda: 4 hour agenda: Introduction (15 minutes), Patient Safety Overview (1 hour), Breakout – Patient safety at your institution (30 minutes), Break (15 minutes), Addressing Patient Safety (45 minutes), Group Discussion – Providing patient safety materials and advocacy (30 minutes) Breakout – Changing one incident (30 minutes), Conclusion and summary (15 minutes)

Need for This Course: The fact that patient safety is a “hot topic” is witnessed by the explosion of website resources and organizations in the field that are addressing this issue. There have been a number of questions on MEDLIB-L related to librarians participating in patient safety within their institutions and several consortiums in Canada, the NN/LM-Greater Midwest Region and the NN/LM-Southeastern Atlantic Region have requested this class. This focus of this class is specifically on librarians meeting the complex and comprehensive information needs of hospital administrators, health professionals, and patients and families. Additionally, this class will help hospital system and other health librarians find ways of participating in existing patient safety programs, identify new programs that may be created and support the work others (hospitals, health professionals, librarians, etc.) are doing in patient safety.

The instructional methods used include Lecture, Slides, Discussion, Brainstorming, and Sharing/Self-disclosure.

Participant Materials: Handouts