Welcome

Welcome to Patient Safety and Incident Reporting.

Over the coming hours you will work through a structured, experience-first programme designed to change not only what you know about patient safety, but how you see your everyday clinical environment. Through a series of short, focused lessons you will develop the clinical and systems-level judgement needed to anticipate harm before it reaches a patient, to report and learn from incidents rigorously, and to help build a just, resilient safety culture.

Patient safety is not a checklist but a discipline — one grounded in vigilance, honest reporting, and shared accountability. This matters because the scale of avoidable harm is large and largely hidden: around 1 in 10 patients is harmed during care, and roughly half of that harm is preventable. Local reporting data show persistent under-reporting and low compliance — which means that most opportunities to learn are lost before they are ever recorded. The purpose of this course is to reverse that pattern, one practitioner at a time.

How the course is built

The programme is organised as a deliberate learning journey, moving from recognition to reporting to cultural change across twenty chapters in five parts:

• Part I — Foundations: what patient safety is, the categories of unsafe care, error versus violation, and the principles of a just culture.
• Part II — Human factors: how human performance shapes safety — the IMSAFE fitness-for-duty check, the Swiss-cheese model of system failure, and structured teamwork and communication using SBAR.
• Part III — Incident reporting: what to report, why, when and by whom; the reporting and learning system; the anatomy of a good incident report; the step-by-step reporting procedure; and root cause analysis.
• Part IV — Reducing harm: clinical risk and quality improvement, infection prevention and hand hygiene, medication safety, and the surgical safety checklist.
• Part V — System and culture: patient engagement and open disclosure, and the policy landscape, including the WHO Global Patient Safety Action Plan.

How to learn here

Each chapter is followed by a short “Check your understanding” so you can consolidate as you go rather than cramming at the end. You begin with a brief pre-test to map what you already know and end with a matched post-test that lets you measure exactly how far you have come. Supporting resources — a course glossary, a consolidated knowledge bank of every question and answer, a video library, and a help section — are available throughout.

You are encouraged to ask questions at any point using the course tutor in the corner of your screen. Inquiry, reflection, and dialogue are not optional extras; they are an integral part of how this course is designed to be completed, and how the concepts move from theory into your daily practice.

Assessment, certification & CPD

To earn your certificate you will complete a capstone Final Assessment built around one real, fully de-identified case study, applying what you have learned to an authentic clinical scenario, followed by a 20-question certification test. On successful completion you will receive a Certificate of Completion issued jointly by Accréditation Sans Frontières (ASF), the Public Health Institute of Georgia (PHIG) and GMJ.ge Academy, with technical support from Accreditation Canada – Georgia Office and academic support from David Tvildiani Medical University.

This activity is accredited for Continuing Professional Development. On completion you will be awarded 2 CPD points, recognised by participating professional bodies and institutions. Your certificate records the CPD points, the date of completion, your final score and a unique, verifiable certificate number.

A standing obligation

Never share any information that could identify a real patient. Protecting confidentiality is the first principle of safe practice. It applies to every lesson, every discussion with the tutor, and above all to your capstone case study — without exception, throughout this course.

Let’s begin. The next step is the pre-test — an honest starting point, not a judgement. Select Continue when you are ready.