Today started off by watching the powerful film on Lewis Blackman, a 15 year old boy who lost his life due to medical errors. This film raised a number of issues that all contributed to an ultimate tragic outcome. It also highlighted for me many of the ways we are still making these same errors today. One particular area that really touched home for me was cross coverage of patients and patient hand offs. While there are many important issues surrounding these topics there are two in particular that I feel I have been a part of already in my time as a resident that had a huge potential for causing patient harm. The first is poor hand off between residents. As the night time resident you may be covering 30-40 patients. I feel this number alone makes effective patient hand off difficult. We are all too often left with… Continue reading →

Today’s discussions included the topic of informed consent. A common theme was that the task of getting a consent signed typically seems to fall to the intern or whoever is deemed “lowest on the totem pole.” There was universal agreement that we had all at some point been charged with getting this consent when we were neither comfortable nor qualified with doing so. The system does not educate new residents on this important job which is largely the fault of a broader and much more concerning cultural issue around informed consent. The real issue is that we have created a system which views informed consent as a way to protect doctors instead of as an educational opportunity for patients. This is totally backwards from how it should be. Instead it should be viewed as a chance to truly educate the patient on their diagnosis, the treatment options available to them,… Continue reading →