The final day of our Telluride Roundtable on “Open and Honest Communication Skills in Healthcare” focused on reflection of the past weeks work and next steps in how best to disseminate the outcomes and products created from our work. One of the special highlights of the Roundtable was the interactions, conversations, sharing and bonding that occurred between our students and our patient advocates during the week. Students told us how they were so positively impacted by the advocate’s willingness to share their stories related to medical error, their passion to help educate, and their continued commitment to making care safer for all of us. Working with, and getting to know, patient safety advocate leaders Helen Haskell, Patty Skolnik, Dan Ford, Carole Hemmelgarn and Rosemary Gibson over the course of the week left lasting impressions on all the students. Both students and advocates identified a number of projects they will collaboratively move forward in the weeks to come.
Over the next few weeks, we will be pulling together all the work completed during the past week and will begin posting consensus curricular models developed by participants on open and honest communication skills in healthcare. We hope the curricular models presented will generate important conversation by visitors to our blog and lead to possible implementation of these models into health systems and health science schools.