The next phase in patient safety education: Towards a standardized, tools-based pathology patient safety curriculum: A call to action from the Association of Pathology Chairs' Residency Program Directors Section Training Residents in Patient Safety Workgroup.

Patient safety education is a mandated Common Program Requirement of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education and for the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada in all medical residency and fellowship programs. Although many hospitals and healthcare environments have general patient safety education tools for trainees, few to none focus on the unique training milieu of pathologists, including a mix of highly automated and manual error-prone processes, frequent multiplicity of events, and lack of direct patient relationships for error disclosure. We established a national Association of Pathology Chairs-Program Directors Section Workgroup focused on patient safety education for pathology trainees entitled Training Residents in Patient Safety (TRIPS). TRIPS included diverse representatives from across the United States, as well as representatives from pathology organizations including the American Board of Pathology, the American Society for Clinical Pathology, the United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology, the College of American Pathologists, and the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine. Objectives of the workgroup included developing a standardized patient safety curriculum, designing teaching and assessment tools, and refining them with pilot sites. Here we report the establishment of TRIPS as well as data from national needs assessment of Program Directors across the country, who confirmed the need for a standardized patient safety curriculum.

Revised Reporting (Issuing Addenda and Amendments) in Pathology.

OBJECTIVES: The purpose of this study was to align the current experiences and best practices in revised reporting (issuing of addenda and amendments) in pathology. Pathology specialties explored in the survey include anatomic pathology, surgical pathology, cytopathology, and hematopathology. METHODS: The study used a cross-sectional design in which an online revised reporting survey was deployed to a large national sample represented by pathologists, pathology residents, pathology fellows, pathology managers, and laboratory directors. RESULTS: Qualitative and quantitative results from this survey highlight significant variation in standards for creating, issuing, and tracking quality indicators related to addenda and amendments. The most notable findings were a lack of standardization and the potential for widespread adoption of revised reporting best practices within and between pathology services. CONCLUSIONS: Survey insight provides the potential for improving patient safety outcomes, engaging with consumers of our reports, providing a current state view of revised reporting, and assessing the attitudes of pathologists and laboratory professionals on how their individual approaches and team-based workflows achieve revised reports. The data generated from this survey will provide patient safety opportunities associated with accurate pathology reporting and will encourage further development of optimal pathology revised reporting guidelines.