Patient Safety Education and Digital Technology Contributions

Abstract

Adverse events in health care became more evident at the beginning of the 21st century, being an emerging problem worldwide and impacting the lives of people receiving health care, contributing to preventable injuries and deaths. This evidence has motivated the development of specific training in the area of patient safety with a strong focus on the education and training of health professionals, and, more recently, it also aimed at patient, informal caregiver and all citizens. In this sense, the use of digital technology for patient safety training has been an important challenge and proves to be a good solution for training and continuous learning, both for professionals and people in general. The use of multimedia, videos, games, simulators, among others, are effectively essential resources to improve people’s health literacy and safety of care.

This chapter presents a narrative review on patient safety training and the contributions of digital technology. The experience report will also be used, presenting some examples of quality improvement projects developed by Portuguese and Brazilian entities, in training contexts, highlighting the importance of investing in the health literacy of professionals, patients/informal caregivers and civil society, through applying specific techniques and using digital technology.

Citation

Diniz, A.M., Ramos, S., Pecora, K. and Branco, J. (2023), "Patient Safety Education and Digital Technology Contributions", Vaz de Almeida, C. and Lytras, M.D. (Ed.) Technology-Enhanced Healthcare Education: Transformative Learning for Patient-centric Health (Emerald Studies in Higher Education, Innovation and Technology), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 145-164. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83753-598-920231011