Badge buddy residents work together on adverse reporting

"Every resident should know how to make an adverse event report," says Nate Margolis, M.D., a fifth-year resident training in New York University's Radiology Residency Program.  (Nate is co-chair of the NYU School of Medicine’s House Staff Patient Safety Council.)

Nate's right, of course, and indeed this is now a requirement of the ACGME, the governing body of residency programs in America:

The Sponsoring Institution must ensure that residents/fellows have access to systems for reporting errors, adverse events, unsafe conditions, and near misses in a protected manner that is free from reprisal.

But this capability is often missing, the victim of a prejudice on the part of many hospitals against resident involvement in this kind of activity.  Often, too, residents feel cowed by a perception that their future career prospects will be damaged by honest reporting.  The situation is complicated, too, for residents who rotate through several hospitals.

Nate and his colleagues decided to help solve this problem using a “badge buddy”—a simple, effective tool to assist residents with the process of reporting events at the multiple hospitals in which they train.  Here's a video describing the initiative, which was strongly supported by the Committee of Interns and Residents (CIR), as well as the senior leaders at NYU.