Incident Reporting Still Lacking Among Many Doctors-in-Training

• 3/13/2010
• Author: Steven Berman
• Category: The Journal Blog
• 13971 Views
• 0 Comments
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To follow up on my previous blog, the deficiencies in patient safety education described in the Lucian Leape Institute report, Unmet Needs: Teaching Physicians to Provide Safe Patient Care, are reflected in another Journal article—cited yesterday in an article in the New York Times, “Learning to Keep Patients Safe in a Culture of Fear” (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/health/11chen.html?emc=tnt&tntemail1=y). Lia Logio and Rangaraj Ramanujam found that doctors-in-training (residents and  fellows) may still be reluctant to report errors. “Medical Trainees’ Formal and Informal Incident Reporting Across a Five-Hospital Academic Medical Center” indicated that of 305 respondents who rotated through all five hospitals represented in the study, only 22.3%–31.5% knew how to locate an incident form, and only 6.2%–20% had completed at least one. The researchers recommend a number of strategies to improve incident reporting, from intensive role modeling by faculty to regularly informing residents about improvements resulting from incident reporting. Moreover, residents’ reporting behaviors seemed to be shaped by unique attributes of different hospitals—even within the same academic center. This led the researchers to suggest that individual hospitals encourage residents to report incidents and emphasize their role in improving the whole system.