Developing diagnostic safety-focused critical thinking module training program in emergency medicine education

Diagnostic errors often relate to suboptimal decisions in clinical reasoning and decision-making steps, such as insufficient assessment, the presence of inadequate or incorrect assumptions, incorrect or incomplete evaluation of existing evidence, and failure to act according to changing conditions or evidence. It is possible to learn and teach higher-order cognitive thinking skills like clinical critical thinking, which can help address cognitive shortcuts and biases in human reasoning and decision-making processes. The primary aim of the research is to develop a clinical critical thinking training program within the framework of diagnostic safety in emergency medicine specialization training, aimed at reducing diagnostic errors. In this thesis research, in accordance with Kern's Program Development 6-step Model. The training module was conducted with 101 emergency medicine assistants, divided into groups of 25, 8-hour of face-to-face training. According to the results of the training program, the assistants statistically significantly increased their median pre-test scores on the knowledge test by 57.1% in the post-test. The assistants increased the number of all correct predictions in the case analysis post-test by 18%. According to the knowledge test cutoff score, the group that scored ≥77 achieved a statistically significant difference by scoring ≥54 in the case analysis test cutoff score. The study has presented the valuable educational tool or resources for acquiring, developing, evaluating, and monitoring diagnostic safety-focused critical thinking skills, which is a non-technical clinical skill. The developed training program have the potential to be part of the core or expanded education of all postgraduate medical students, undergraduate medical education and other health profession students.