Faculty perspectives on making patient safety visible in undergraduate health professions education: a qualitative CIPP-informed study

Patient safety is an essential competency for all health professionals, yet its integration into undergraduate health professions curricula is often implicit, variable and difficult to assess. Faculty perspectives are important because faculty shape curriculum design, delivery and assessment. This study explored faculty perspectives on patient safety education across undergraduate health professions programmes at Qatar University using the Context, Input, Process and Product (CIPP) evaluation framework. A qualitative descriptive study was conducted using semi-structured interviews with faculty members involved in designing, teaching or assessing patient safety content across undergraduate health professions programmes at Qatar University. Participants were recruited using purposive and snowball sampling. The interview guide was developed around the four CIPP domains, and data were analysed deductively using the CIPP framework, with themes developed inductively within each domain. Nineteen faculty members from Medicine, Pharmacy, Public Health, Biomedical Sciences, Physiotherapy, Nutrition, and Dental Medicine participated. Six overarching themes were generated and mapped across the CIPP domains. Faculty viewed patient safety as important, but its interpretation varied across disciplines. Patient safety was usually embedded implicitly within ethics, experiential learning, simulation and clinical teaching rather than explicitly labelled or assessed. Participants identified gaps in visibility, practical application and assessment, particularly in relation to error reporting, incident review and structured learning from practice. Suggested improvements included clearer learning outcomes, explicit curricular integration, experiential and interprofessional learning, and faculty development. Barriers included limited time, funding, workload and curricular crowding. Patient safety was widely valued, but often remained implicit, discipline-specific and difficult to assess. Making patient safety more visible may require explicit learning outcomes, curriculum mapping, applied assessment and authentic experiential or interprofessional learning opportunities. Future research should triangulate faculty perspectives with curricular evidence, assessment data, and student and graduate perspectives.