Educational Perspectives

Abstract

The morbidity and mortality (M&M) conference offers an opportunity to incorporate principles of quality assurance and patient safety into neonatal practice, while providing a rich opportunity to teach many of the Accreditation Council on Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) core competencies. A historical review highlights the basis of the M&M conference as rooted in the desire to improve physician practice and patient outcomes. Despite the lack of an identifiable, systematic approach to M&M-type conferences among neonatology programs, both the tradition of improving physician practice and patient outcomes by framing suboptimal outcomes as educational opportunities and the dawning of the era of competency-based graduate medical education support the need for neonatology divisions to offer M&M conferences in a contemporary format. Educational models emphasizing quality improvement, patient safety, and incorporation of the core competencies are available to support the goals and objectives of a divisional M&M conference. Setting clear goals, incorporating trained moderators, and having a documentation plan may all contribute to the success of the conference. The addition of an action plan and follow-up component to M&M conferences further credentials this activity as an integral part of overall quality improvement efforts while providing real-life evidence of practice-based learning and improvement and the importance of systems-based thinking.