Tag Archives: medical errors

Fewer Intern Hours & No Change in Patient Safety

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Excerpt from Gastroenterology & Endoscopy News (Shorter Workweeks for Interns Do Not Promote Patient Safety) :

A policy to shorten the workweek for interns in the United States has failed to improve their quality of life and has possibly put patients at greater risk for medical errors, a new study has found (Sen S et al. JAMA Intern Med 2013;173:657-662).

The 2011 policy change, recommended by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, capped at 16 continuous hours the longest shift a first-year resident could work in the hope that doing so would ease the strain on physician trainees.

But although the new rules have shortened the typical intern’s workweek from 67 to 64.3 hours, they haven’t encouraged residents to sleep more, helped them to avoid depression or increased their overall sense of well-being, the study found…The study was based on email surveys of 2,323 residents …entered training in 2009, 2010 and 2011, after the rule change.

“Given that increased sleep was a key [mechanism] through which the new duty-hour restrictions were intended to improve the health of residents, the lack of such an effect in the postimplementation cohort in our study is a cause for concern,” wrote the authors, led by Srijan Sen, MD, PhD, a psychiatrist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “Designing work schedules that account for circadian phase and explicitly training residents on practices to increase sleep time and improve sleep quality may be necessary.”

Checklists for Crisis and Daily Care

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Not surprisingly, a new study has shown that checklists were associated with improvement in the management of operating-room crisis (NEJM 2013;  368: 246-53).

Many people use a checklist just to go to the grocery store so they don’t forget something important.  In medicine, checklists offer the same opportunity.

In this particular study, 17 operating-room teams participated in 106 simulated surgical crisis scenarios.  When checklists were available, there was better adherence to lifesaving processes: only 6% of steps were missed with checklists compared with 23% when they were unavailable.  Every team performed better when the crisis checklists were available.  Furthermore, 97% of participants reported they would prefer to have a checklist in the event of a crisis.

There were many limitations of this study, particularly the absence of surgeons from most of the simulations (due to difficulty enlisting them as volunteers).  Nevertheless, “experts have long recognized the potential for human fallibility in complex systems…it has been nearly 100 years since the surgeon W. Wayne Babcock called for emergency protocols to be rehearsed and ‘posted on the walls of every operating room.'”

For a pediatric gastroenterologist, the implication of this study is much broader.  It is trying to develop a checklist for every patient.  For a patient with a GI bleed, that checklist may include a supply list for the endoscopy suite, having written instructions for the settings of the cautery equipment, checking the proper PPI dose, and drawing a specific set of labs.  Agreeing to a minimum and not-too-onerous checklist would be worthwhile for almost anybody.  If you have a checklist for any GI condition (or a mobile app), think about adding a comment to this posting. If something is important in day-to-day care of a specific condition, a “hardstop” can be incorporated into electronic records as a reminder.

Related blog entries (mostly guidelines –not really checklists for a few specific conditions):

A much more articulate spokesman for checklists would be Atul Gawande: