A Message of Gratitude
I have no message, no lesson, nor a call to action to post about this evening. I simply have a sincere moment of gratitude to extend to the Marseille Patient Safety Summer Camp.
The knowledge I’ve gained from these four days has been invaluable as well as the connections I’ve made with other healthcare students and professionals.
Let’s put the numbers on the board.
“Put the numbers on the board and the numbers will move.” This lesson was taught within the context of healthcare transparency, but it resonates broadly.
An effective means of passively encouraging change is to broadcast the facts publicly. It spurs conversations between colleagues. It ignites competition within programs to improve. It can even initiate a journey through the 5 stages of grief for some individuals. Ultimately, it generates a stir. This stir is exactly what we need to draw attention to patient safety and medical education.
Too many times during this roundtable so far have I heard a fellow student exasperate “why aren’t we learning this in school?!” The knowledge we’re acquiring is invaluable and we are collectively shocked and disgruntled that these topics are not effectively breached, especially during the didactic half of the medical school curriculum.
This evening, after many riveting discussions and much late-night brainstorming, amongst a… Continue reading
To be obnoxious.
“I’m a little obnoxious sometimes,” claimed Dan Ford this afternoon discussing his fervent advocacy of root cause analyses in response to sentinel events. Earlier that morning, Mandy too had confessed to being “that annoying nurse” who unabashedly telephones on-call residents when a concern arises. These champions of patient safety proudly own these deprecatory adjectives like “obnoxious” and “annoying” because they know that their actions are challenging the status quo for the betterment of patient care.
It is my hope that all of us, students and professionals alike, emerge from this week in Marseille a bit more enthusiastic about being obnoxious. To be “obnoxious” in this context is to put our patients’ needs first in spite of a bruised ego. We “annoy” despite the fear of openly defying the medical culture’s norms, and we “irritate” others because we have the courage to understand that it will take assertive individuals to lead… Continue reading