Wake Up Calls

I’ll never forget the patient safety lecture I had early in my first year of medical school.  The statistics on patient deaths due to preventable medical errors both shocked and horrified me, and it was this information that drove me to apply for the Marseille Academy for Emerging Leaders in Patient Safety.  During one of our lectures, parts of our applications were shared with the group and that moment when I found out the truth about the rate of medical errors was the part of my application which the lecturer shared.  As he put it, that moment was my wake up call.  And this is true.  However, like our alarm clocks it’s easy to hit snooze on our wake up calls.  It’s easy to push uncomfortable truths to the back of our minds and focus on the good in medicine, not the bad.… Continue reading →