A graduate-level certificate in patient safety has been developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) as part of the university's AHRQ-funded Developmental Center for Evaluation and Research in Patient Safety, which is known as the Systems Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety (SEIPS). This patient safety certificate, which is open to all graduate students enrolled at UW-Madison, combines course work from the departments of industrial engineering, population health sciences, and medical physics, as well as the school of pharmacy, school of nursing, and the law school. The course work covers the following areas: basic patient safety terms, concepts, and statistics; medical error causation; human error; tools to assess safety and risk; systems design principles; safety culture; measurement of risk; and analysis of safety and risk. It also covers technology used to improve patient safety, human factors engineering as applied to patient safety, finance/economics of patient safety, organizations involved in patient safety, medication use process and safety, implications of medication errors, teamwork in health care, and medical error reporting. The patient safety certificate requires five courses, including three core patient safety courses, a patient safety practicum, and a patient safety guest lecture seminar. The practicum is designed to allow students to spend a semester at various health care organizations (hospital, outpatient clinic, long-term care facility, and home care), where individual students will participate in patient safety projects related to analysis, design, and/or implementation.