Thursday, August 22, 2013

Medical residents taking the lead on quality improvement

A note from my friends and colleagues at the Committee of Interns and Residents (CIR): 

Although medical residents are often the first line of contact for most patients in academic medical centers and teaching hospitals, medical residency offers little in the way of formal training on skills needed to keep patients safe from medical errors or on how to deliver high-quality, cost-effective care.

To cope with the pressures of today’s health system and new rules requiring clinically competency in patient safety, the national organization representing 13,000 of the nation’s interns and residents is launching the first online platform to give doctors in training information, tools, and best practices they need to deliver care that keeps patients from harm.  CIR calls the new site QIGateway, and it is a repository of research, case studies, and tools related to quality improvement and patient safety that are relevant to medical residents and interns. 

This new platform is more than just an important resource for physicians in training.  It reflects the leadership residents and interns are taking to reduce medication errors, reconcile medications, and make sure patients are discharged and transferred properly so they don’t return to the hospital unnecessarily. This leadership is important because by 2015, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) will require all resident physicians to demonstrate clinical competency related to quality improvement and patient safety.  Teaching hospitals are under pressure to avoid patient errors and to make sure they are teaching these competencies to doctors in training.

Check out this video.  (If you cannot see the video, click here.)

1 comment:

Dan Riley said...

Paul, way off the subject here, but thought you'd like to know that you've been cited in this brand new book

http://thenobbyworks.blogspot.com/2013/08/heres-to-continuous-improvement.html