Physician Event Reporting: Training the Next Generation of Physicians

Abstract

ABSTRACT Physician reporting of adverse events and unsafe situations remains extremely low, despite the increased access to and use of electronic event reporting systems. We implemented an electronic, Web-based event reporting system at five University of California medical center campuses. While these campuses have witnessed approximately a three-fold increase in staff reporting following the implementation of the electronic system in 2003, physician reporting remains low — only 1.7 percent of all submitted reports were from physicians and only 4.5 percent of registered users are attending physicians and house officers. Our experience validates that of others; specifically, physician event reporting is a largely elusive practice. To change this behavior, it may be necessary to start at the beginning — to begin the discussion of error disclosure and adverse event reporting at the time when future physicians are still medical students. There have been several calls for medical schools and academic medical centers to improve patient safety and the quality of health care by explicitly educating and training the next generation of physicians in these areas. Although quality of care is implicit in most medical and other professional school curricula, medical students generally are not given the training necessary to meet the specific challenges outlined by the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on Quality of Health Care in America reports, including To Err Is Human.