Protecting Yourself as a Patient Expands to Southern California Through UCI Osher Lifelong Learning Institute

The Jewish Healthcare Foundation’s (JHF) “Protecting Yourself as a Patient” course continues to grow beyond Pittsburgh, reaching older adults on the West Coast through a new relationship with the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at University of California Irvine (UCI) Division of Continuing Education.

Originally developed and launched through Carnegie Mellon University’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Pittsburgh, the course was designed to help older adults better understand medical harm and equip them with practical strategies to protect themselves and their loved ones during healthcare encounters. The course addresses common areas of preventable harm including diagnostic error, medication safety, infections, patient care, and procedural and surgical safety.

The OLLI at UCI offering marks the first time the course has been scaled and implemented in another region of the United States outside of Pittsburgh, and offered as a hybrid format, in-person and live via Zoom.

The 3-session course offered in 2-hour blocks was brought to OLLI at UCI thanks to Susen Kay, leader of UCI OLLI’s STEM committee. Kay worked alongside patient safety subject matter expert, Dr. Alpesh Amin to adapt and facilitate the course for a new audience while maintaining the program’s core focus on empowering patients and families to play an active role in safer care. A total of 106 students enrolled in the course (about half in-person and half via Zoom).

To support the expansion, JHF developed and shared a comprehensive toolkit with the UCI team. The toolkit included recorded presentations, facilitator guidance, planning materials, communication templates, and implementation resources designed to help other OLLI programs successfully adopt the course in their own communities.

“This course was intentionally designed to be scalable,” said Ariana Longley, project manager at Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative. “Older adults across the country are navigating increasingly complex healthcare systems, and we believe practical patient safety education should be more widely accessible. Seeing the course successfully adapted at UCI, in my own backyard, is an exciting milestone.”

The original Pittsburgh course, hosted through CMU’s OLLI program, featured national patient safety experts and focused on helping participants understand both the systemic causes of medical harm and the concrete actions patients can take to reduce risk. Participants explored topics including communicating effectively with clinicians, preparing for procedures, preventing medication errors, and recognizing signs of healthcare-associated infections.

This momentum will continue later this summer when the Osher National Resource Center will offer “Protecting Yourself As a Patient” to their national network of 124 OLLIs. The summer offering is expected to introduce the course and its concepts to 54 programs, nearly half of the individual OLLIs.

JHF leaders hope the course will continue to spread to additional regions in the years ahead.

“Older adults are among the most frequent users of healthcare services and are often managing multiple conditions, medications, and transitions of care,” JHF and Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative's (PRHI) President and CEO Karen Wolk Feinstein, PhD said. “By helping people better understand how to navigate the healthcare system safely, we can strengthen patient engagement and help prevent harm before it occurs.”

The “Protecting Yourself as a Patient” course reflects JHF and PRHI's longstanding commitment to advancing patient safety through education, innovation, and public engagement.