Enhancing generational change in patient safety attitudes through peer leadership.

BACKGROUND

Despite peer-led teaching demonstrating benefits in patient safety education, few studies have evaluated these programmes from the perspective of peer leaders.

OBJECTIVE

To evaluate the impact of peer leader participation in a patient safety education workshop in improving their patient safety attitudes.

PARTICIPANTS

34 final year pharmacy student peer leaders.

METHODS

An interactive peer-led patient safety workshop was delivered to 249 first year pharmacy students. Peer leaders' attitudes were assessed 2 months prior to and immediately after peer leader training; and immediately after and 1 month following the workshop. Using a validated patient safety attitudinal survey, repeated measures analysis of variance and pairwise comparisons were used to evaluate changes in four key attitudes over time: being quality improvement focused; internalising errors; questioning more senior healthcare professionals' behaviours; and attitudes towards the open disclosure of errors.

RESULTS

Compared to baseline, peer leaders' attitudes towards open disclosure significantly improved immediately following the workshop (p=0.010) and were sustained after 1 month (p=0.028). Attitudes towards being quality improvement focused also improved significantly 1 month after the workshop (p=0.003).

CONCLUSIONS

Participation in a peer-led patient safety education programme benefits both students and peer leaders, enabling further mastery of concepts and enhancing generational change in patient safety practices.