Like the other residents here, I came to Marseille last week already passionate about creating a safe, high-quality future for American healthcare. As a student and now resident, it had always seemed like a daunting task, one with a few passionate Davids looking to take down the Goliath that is the ongoing epidemic of medical error.

Over the past 5 days, I met about 25 other residents, all from different backgrounds and specialties, who shared my passion. And I met and learned from over a dozen experts and leaders, physicans and non-physicians, who have been fighting the fight for a long time and who have already helped shape a safer, better landscape for medicine.

In meeting and learning from all of these people, with all of us briefly living together in the mountains of Colorado, it became clear to me that because of the work of the TPSSC faculty and… Continue reading →

Stories can be great agents of change. As an internist, my day is spent hearing and telling stories– presenting a patient to an attending or a consultant is telling a story. Making a diagnosis is telling a story whose background, characters, and plot center around the central theme of a certain diagnosis. We are comfortable with these stories, we expect them to be told in a certain way, and we usually don’t expect too many surprises.

Patient safety happens in stories too. Too often, however, instead of ending with “the diagnosis was X so the patient was treated with Y,” these stories end in disappointment, sadness, fear, or anger. In day to day medicine, we often remove ourselves from the emotion of the events and stories unfolding in front of us. But when it comes to stories of patient safety, that emotion is unavoidable since we as providers are central… Continue reading →