Learning Objectives

After completing this course you’ll be able to:

1.	Describe the scope of the medical errors problems and cite statistics showing public concern about the quality of health care.
2.	Define and identify various types of medical errors.
3.	List five steps a patient can take for safer health care.
4.	Describe what a patient can do to avoid medical errors.
5.	Identify 4 ways to minimize errors.
6.	Make a list of “high-alert" medications.
7.	List and review target procedures commonly associated with medication errors.
8.	Identify 10 common sources of error.
9.	Describe successful practices for improving medication safety.
10.	Describe how errors occur in health-care delivery steps.
11.	Describe various measures that can be taken to improve patient safety.
12.	Implement recommendations for identifying and learning from errors in pediatrics.
13.	Describe the application of root cause analysis in medicine and outline its significant methodological limitations.
14.	Explain the effects of sleep debt.
15.	Explain the deleterious effect of night shifts and shift rotation on performance.
16.	Recite studies that have documented the impact of fatigue on medical personnel performance.
17.	Describe the impact of direction and speed of rotation of shift work on worker fatigue.