IHI Open School Patient Safety Subscription

Included Courses

Visit each course page for detailed lesson summaries and Continuing Education information.

PS 101: Introduction to Patient Safety
No one embarks on a health care career intending to harm patients. But much too often, patients die or suffer injuries because of their experiences within the health care system. In this course, you’ll learn why becoming a student of patient safety is critical for everyone involved in health care today, and you will learn a framework for building safer, more reliable systems of care.

PS 102: From Error to Harm
This course provides an overview of the key concepts in the field of patient safety. You’ll learn the relationship between error and harm, and how unsafe conditions and human error lead to harm — through something called the Swiss cheese model. You’ll learn how to classify different types of unsafe acts that humans commit, including error, and how the types of unsafe acts relate to harm. Finally, you’ll learn about how the field of patient safety has expanded its focus from reducing error alone to encompassing efforts to reduce harm as well.

PS 103: Human Factors and Safety
This course is an introduction to the field of human factors: how to incorporate knowledge of human behavior in the design of safe systems. You’ll explore case studies to analyze the human factors issues involved in health care situations. And you’ll learn how to use human factors principles to design safer systems of care and implement effective strategies to prevent errors and mitigate their effects. Finally, you’ll learn how technology can reduce errors — even as, in some cases, it can introduce new opportunities for errors.

PS 104: Teamwork and Communication
Effective teamwork and communication are critical parts of the design of safe systems. In this course, you’ll learn what makes an effective team through case studies from health care and elsewhere. You’ll analyze the effects of individual behavior for promoting teamwork, communication, and a culture of safety. You will learn several essential communication tools, and you will learn how to prevent common problems associated with lapses in communication during inherently risky health care situations.

PS 105: Responding to Adverse Events
In this course, we’re going to describe and advocate a patient-centered approach to use when things go wrong. This approach to adverse events and medical error centers on the needs of the patient, but it is also the best way to address the needs of a caregiver in the wake of an adverse event.

PS 201: Root Cause Analyses and Actions
This course introduces learners to a systematic response to error called Root Cause Analyses and Actions (RCA2). The goal of RCA2 is to learn from adverse events and near misses, and to take action to prevent them from happening in the future. By the end of this course, you’ll have a step-by-step approach for investigating an event and improving after something goes wrong.

PS 202: Achieving Total Systems Safety
This course will review eight key recommendations for achieving safety on a system-wide level, as proposed by the IHI report Free from Harm: Accelerating Patient Safety Improvement Fifteen Years after To Err Is Human.

PS 203: Pursuing Professional Accountability and a Just Culture
This course focuses on how organizations can create and foster a culture of safety. It will assist leaders in creating, shaping, and sustaining the type of culture needed to advance patient and workforce safety efforts. It is designed to inspire, motivate, and inform you as you lead your organization on its journey to zero harm.

Continuing Education Credits

Earn Continuing Education (CE) credits with accreditation from American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC), the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE), the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME), and the National Association for Healthcare Quality (NAHQ). As of April 2023, more than 1.77 million CE credits have been claimed through Open School courses.

Learn more about Continuing Education credits

Note: Subscriptions will not auto-renew. We will contact you when your subscription is approaching expiration. Scholarships may be available in cases of financial hardship.