[EDUCATING MEDICAL STUDENTS TO PROFESSIONALISM AND SAFETY IN HEALTHCARE AND THE IMPACT OF THE COVID-19 EPIDEMIC - AN ISRAELI PERSPECTIVE].

INTRODUCTION

Medical students' education traditionally focuses on professionalism (knowledge and skills) alongside compassion. Recently, the importance of quality of care, safety and error prevention has increased. Teaching students through adopting the terminology, tools and insights of quality and safety will not only promote safety, but may also increase treatment effectiveness, patient satisfaction and staff commitment. The Covid-19 epidemic, enforcing social distancing and strict protective actions, have all deepened the challenges in safety-targeted education, incurring implementation difficulties: 1) restricting bedside teaching; 2) reducing simulations and clerkship peer discussions;, 3) distorting the equilibrium of risk management/safety insight and clinical perception significance (anamnesis, physical examination).

AIMS

This study aimed to examine standpoints towards safety education in medical studies among students and teacher.

METHODS

A survey was conducted among students in pre-clinical courses, department directors/tutors and focus-group discussions among managers.

RESULTS

Medical students ranked safety-targeted education as highly important alongside academic knowledge, clinical skills and compassion. Department head managers and teaching physicians rated compassion and safety as highly important, more than research curiosity, values, resilience, family involvement and clinical proficiency, and much more than technical skills and the patient's preferences. In the first epidemic wave, safety-targeted education was graded higher by the focus-group leaders, when compared to teaching physicians, and scoring was similar for resilience, compassion, proficiency and knowledge. During the second wave, the department heads emphasized the importance of safety.

CONCLUSIONS

Transparency analysis of medical students' standpoints may reveal barriers to implement safety/quality measures in their curriculum.