Incorporating patient safety principles in academic and clinical education for health science professionals is necessary to support widespread adoption of safety practices. It is vital to understand nursing students’ perspectives on patient safety and the extent to which patient safety is addressed in the classroom and clinical settings. In this cross-sectional study, students in all 4 years of an undergraduate program were asked to complete the Health Professional Education in Patient Safety Survey. Eighty-one percent (238 of 293) of students completed the questionnaire. Responses were favorable, with students reporting confidence in learning about a variety of patient safety competencies. Of note, there were decreasing levels of confidence in the third-year and fourth-year students and low-to-moderate correlation between classroom and clinical responses. These results support the importance of consistently engaging students in safety principles early in and throughout their health care programs.

Because of the emerging dominance of managed care, it is important to encourage the development of partnerships and affiliations between academic health centers (AHCs) and managed care organizations (MCOs) to train tomorrow's physicians to operate effectively in the new health care environment. But to what extent do such relationships exist now. In 1996, the authors sought to identify existing databases on the availability and extent of existing education partnerships and affiliations between AHCs and MCOs and the availability of such information to policymakers, the educational community, students, and residents. Despite a thorough search of the literature and interviews with representatives of education and practice organizations and with other experts in the medical education and managed care fields, the authors found no centralized or even partly centralized database on opportunities for training in managed care settings or on AHC-MCO partnerships. However, anecdotal evidence revealed eight such partnerships, each different from the others, that can serve as models for future partnerships; these are described. The authors speculate about why there are not more data describing AHC-MCO partnerships. They conclude by stating that the health care and health education industries have a variety of professional associations that could work together to assemble and make available such data to help build the educational and information infrastructure needed to train future physicians.