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SUMMARY Continuous quality improvement is an accepted mandate in healthcare services. The delivery of the best, evidencebased quality of care ultimately depends on the competences of practitioners as well as the system that supports their work. Medical education has been increasingly called upon to insure providers possess the skills and understanding necessary to fulfill the quality mission. Patient safety has in the past five years rapidly risen to the top of the healthcare policy agenda, and been incorporated into quality initiatives. Demand for curricula in patient safety and transfer of safety lessons learned in other risky industries have created new responsibilities for medical educators. Simulationbased medical education will help fill these needs. Simulation offers ethical benefits, increased precision and relevance of training and competency assessment, and new methods of teaching error management and safety culture. Established and successful simulation methods such as standardized patients and task trainers are being joined by newer approaches enabled by improved technology.
Introduction
The primary goal of health professionals should be the provision of the best possible quality care to patients. Medical education provides a critical means for achieving this goal by helping practitioners develop an appropriate range of skills, knowledge, and attitudes. Although patient safety has been increasingly recognized as a key dimension of quality care, systematic safety education for healthcare professionals is lacking. Recent high-level policy directives have called for the creation of patient safety curricula to fill this gap. Medical simulation tools and techniques have much to offer in this regard, especially in the areas of error management, training for risky procedures, and assessing competences. The objective of this paper is to discuss how innovations in simulation can aid educators in improving training on patient safety issues.
Patient safety
Many forces have converged to spotlight the issue of patient safety today. These include mounting epidemiological research on patient injuries, cost pressures, rapid advances in progress in safety in other high-risk industries and digital information support, changing cultural norms about acceptable risk and location of control, and the evolution of the quality movement.
Safety, from the patient perspective and in the context of medical errors, refers to `freedom from accidental injury'.
Unfortunately, recent reports on patient safety indicate that healthcare is not as safe as it should...