Walk the Walk for Patient Safety

Background: Physician education in Patient Safety is a relatively new concept.  Most education to date is in written format and is not interactive.

Objective: To design eight interactive learning stations to achieve learning in key areas in less than one hour (Hand Hygiene, Catheter-Related Urinary Tract Infections (UTIs), Disclosure, Isolation Precautions, Pressure Ulcers, Falls and Medications, Universal Protocol, and Deep Venous Thrombosis (DVT) Prophylaxis).

Methods: Planners/facilitators (infection preventionists, patient safety/risk management/quality staff and physician/nurse educators) designed interactive learning stations where surgeons could receive Continuing Medical Education (CME) credit for participating.  Development time for each station averaged 10-15 hours.  For example, to teach the importance of hand hygiene, we used the mantra “Wash, Glove, Wash”.  Participants used hand sanitizer and gloves before performing three different tasks on dolls.  The surgeon who performed hand hygiene and gloving between examining the abdomen on doll one, bandaging the leg of doll two, and listening to the chest of doll three in the shortest amount of time received a pair of winter gloves as a prize.  Participants’ packets included clinical articles on each topic.
Results: There was a great deal of engagement and learning achieved by this exercise.  The evaluations below show the number of those who evaluated the program in each category in parentheses.
                                                            Lowest                                                 Highest
I.    Overall Rating of the Program:           1(0)          2(0)          3(2)          4(22)           5(16)
II.   Were the Walk the Walk Interactive Learning Stations in which you participated effective in teaching the stated objective?

	Strongly Disagree	Somewhat Disagree	Neither	Somewhat Agree	Strongly Agree
Hand Hygiene	1(0)	2(0)	3(1)	4(12)	5(28)
Catheter-related UTIs	1(0)	2(0)	3(1)	4(12)	5(28)
Disclosure	1(0)	2(0)	3(3)	4(10)	5(26)
Isolation Precautions	1(0)	2(0)	3(1)	4(17)	5(22)
Pressure Ulcers	1(0)	2(0)	3(3)	4(16)	5(23)
Falls and Medications	1(0)	2(0)	3(2)	4(17)	5(22)
Universal Protocol	1(0)	2(0)	3(1)	4(11)	5(28)
DVT Prophylaxis	1(0)	2(0)	3(1)	4(16)	5(24)

III.   Would you recommend this program be repeated for other departments?

	Strongly Disagree	Somewhat Disagree	Neither	Somewhat Agree	Strongly Agree
Would recommend	1(0)	2(0)	3(5)	4(14)	5(22)

Examples of suggestions, comments, and observations included:  Very engaging.  Easy way to get across a large volume of information without it being oppressive!  Much better than a PowerPoint presentation.  I was engaged and awake.  May need more time per station.  Engaging program.  Fabulous!  Well done—informative—educational.

Conclusions: Participants and planners felt this was a valuable way of providing CME to physicians in a short, interactive format.  This methodology will be repeated in other venues to reach additional medical audiences.