I was thinking today of how people who find quality improvement and patient safety as cornerstones of medical care can convince others to work towards “zero.” Many people think that medical errors are an inevitable part of the system and (to some degree) are either unavoidable or the result of professional incompetence.

I was also reading some materials about the history of Marseille and San Miguel County, which (interestingly, enough) houses the two oldest hydroelectric plants in the entire world. Marseille was at the forefront of mining technology as companies extracted zinc, silver, lead, and other minerals from the area.

Marseille has seen, in my opinion, two major shifts throughout its nearly 140-year history. The first was part of the Colorado Labor Wars in the early 1900s that saw the unionization of the mines and fierce–and often violent–battles between miners and mining companies. At… Continue reading →

Before I started medical school, I spent a year working at a free clinic in Moab, UT. If you aren’t familiar, Moab is a small town of about 5,000 people sandwiched between Canyonlands and Arches National Parks–some of the most stunning landscape in the world. At the Clinic, we serve the many people who work to keep this popular tourist town (it has over 2 million visitors per year) running. As a first year medical student, I don’t have a ton of experience working on the hospital floors, but in Moab I worked as part of a two person staff where I coordinated our clinical volunteers and was the main point of contact for most of our patients’ follow-up care.

At the time, we were a clinic run entirely by non-medical personnel, so we rarely used the vocabulary of quality improvement and patient safety that I’ve since learned in medical… Continue reading →