A new patient safety curriculum was successfully introduced into a family medicine residency. The curriculum integrates patient safety into residents' daily activities and incorporates input from the disciplines of nursing and pharmacy so as to help build more effective clinical teams and inculcate a culture of safety.

HIT adoption and use in rural primary care offices does not appear to be lower than in urban offices. The situation, however, is dynamic and warrants further monitoring.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Each primary care practice should be viewed as a complex adaptive micro-system with its own unique characteristics. To improve safety, under constraints of limited resources and numerous competing demands, practices need to identify those vulnerabilities that pose the greatest risks and focus efforts on these. The Objective was to develop and test a novel methodology that forms self-empowered learning teams that can prioritise safety problems based on the combination of error frequency and severity of consequences, and then devise feasible interventions.METHODS: A survey instrument was designed and used to elicit, in qualitative terms, staff perceptions of frequency, p, and severity, s, of various types/causes of primary care errors. The qualitative responses were quantified using an algorithm that allowed for risk aversion. Relative hazard rate, h = pxs, was used as the basis for prioritising safety problems in two primary care test practices.RESULTS: Each site identified its own set of priorities with very little overlap. Within each site there was high concordance between priorities identified by physicians, nursing and administrative staff but each site appeared to be unique. Priorities also remained stable with variation in the degree of risk aversiveness assumed in the Hazard calculation. INTERPRETATION AND CONCLUSIONS: The method aided formation of central 'attractors'in the form of self-empowered effective learning teams with a common vision to help their complex micro-systems to adapt and thrive. This pro-active type of methodology helps in creating a sustainable safety culture, and has been adapted for other health-care settings and physician training.

Results suggest that having a certified diabetes educator trainee as part of the primary care practice team may advance diabetes care, as evidenced by improvements in glucose control. Responses from providers and staff suggest that the certified diabetes educator trainees were well integrated into the practices and were perceived as instrumental in educating patients to better manage their diabetes.

Patient safety and medical errors in ambulatory primary care are receiving increasing attention from policy makers, accreditation bodies and researchers, as well as by practising family physicians and their patients. While a great deal of progress has been made in understanding errors in hospital settings, it is important to recognise that ambulatory settings pose a very large and different set of challenges and that the types of hazards that exist and the strategies required to reduce them are very different.What is needed is a logical theoretical model for understanding the causes of errors in primary care, the role of healthcare systems in contributing to errors, the propagation of errors through complex systems and, importantly, for understanding ambulatory primary care in the context of the larger healthcare system. The authors have developed such a model using a formal 'systems engineering' approach borrowed from the management sciences and engineering. This approach has not previously been formally described in the medical literature. This paper outlines the formal systems approach, presents our visual model of the system, and describes some experiences with and potential applications of the model for monitoring and improving safety. Applications include providing a framework to help focus research efforts, creation of new (visual) error reporting and taxonomy systems, furnishing a common and unambiguous vision for the healthcare team, and facilitating retrospective and prospective analyses of errors and adverse events. It is aimed at system redesign for safety improvement through a computer-based patient-centred safety enhancement and monitoring instrument (SEMI-P). This model can be integrated with electronic medical records (EMRs).