Minding the Gap

A colleague of mine posed an interesting question earlier today about how outpatient providers and nurses can contribute to patient safety.  His comments conjured up something that I too have been mentally noodling since arriving here at the Marseille Experience.  I was instantly reminded of an interesting observation made by one of my clerkship directors right before starting an ambulatory internal medicine rotation, in which he drew a line of an individual’s health over the course of their lifetime. The primary take-away from this diagram was that a very small percentage of an average person’s “health timeline” is spent as a hospitalized patient. Fortunately, most people are healthy, and can manage there health as an outpatient. Does that mean they are not the victims of medical error? Probably not. Yet our discussions have not addressed this issue. In particular, our patients are at greatest risk… Continue reading →