Attendees participate in a discussion during an RCA W3 course in January 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and high demand, the current course was broken into three groups and conducted virtually (Photo by: Jason Edwards, Brooke Army Medical Center).
The goal of the one-day RCA course, said Matos, is to instill knowledge and confidence about patient safety and the RCA process to this audience.
"Its format is more conducive to graduate medical education physician trainees and faculty, and also our nurses, allied health, and support staff who don't typically have the ability to take a full week off," said Matos.
Beginning in December 2018, San Antonio Uniformed Services Health Education Consortium, located at Brooke Army Medical Center, offered its first RCA W3 course using a flipped classroom approach, which is a method that allows students to complete readings at home and use class time to work on live problem solving.
The courses are comprised of voluntary civilian and active-duty participants from throughout military medicine with an interest in patient safety, including graduate medical education residents and faculty, nurses, pharmacists, therapists, and administrators.
"In December of 2018, we began with 75 participants and by January 2020 we had 95 participants," said Matos. "There's a lot of administrative work that goes into putting something like that together, but they were wildly successful."
Those first two courses, she said, created the demand for more. For this year's course, the COVID-19 pandemic created a unique problem – the inability to put over 100 people in room together - which required a unique solution.
"We had over 150 people interested in attending the course," said Matos. "We established a virtual platform and created three smaller courses, capping it at around 50 students per course. We completed a course in January, another in March and we have our last course for this year scheduled for May."
An added benefit of these courses being conducted virtually is that it has opened participation from outside of the San Antonio area, including attendees from California and Germany.
Matos said that the feedback so far has been extremely positive, and the courses seem to be doing exactly what they were intended to do.
"People have felt that their confidence in participating in, interviewing people, and actually leading people in an RCA has all improved as a result of this course," said Matos.
A better understanding of the process, she said, leads to these individuals becoming RCA team members at their facilities with the requisite tools and knowledge at their disposal. This, in turn, leads to stronger corrective action plans and greater prevention of future patient safety issues.
"We know trainees practice what they learn, and those practices persist years after they graduate, said Matos. "In the military, we hire 100% of our graduates into our own system, the MHS, so I feel we have a moral obligation to train them and teach them about patient safety and why it matters."