Error Reporting in Graduate Medical Education

"Error Reporting in Graduate Medical Education" explores the role of incident reporting in patient safety behaviors by graduate medical education (GME) trainees. The study analyzes incident reports submitted by residents at UC Irvine Health over two academic years, highlighting the relatively low reporting rates despite the prevalence of medical errors. It underscores efforts to improve engagement through training, feedback, and safety officer programs while suggesting a need for national tracking of GME error reporting. The findings indicate that further institutional and cultural changes are necessary to encourage active participation in error reporting and enhance patient safety education in residency programs.

1. Error Reporting in Graduate Medical Education Frequency and type of error reporting by residents in a large ACGME-accredited sponsoring institution Danielle Perret MD, Abhishek Kishor Dalal BA, Justin Chin MA, Jeremy Nguyen BS, Charlene Miranda-Wood RN MS, Coleen Thompson RN BSN, Donna Grochow RN MSN, Douglas Merrill MD MBA University of California Irvine We anticipate that most GME trainees will make medical errors. Although greater than 117,000 housestaff trainees provide care in US medical centers, limited information is available about frequency and type of error reporting by residents. This is important because error reporting is necessary to achieve a state of high reliability. The Safety and Quality Information System (SQIS) database was reviewed for all resident error/incident report entries during the 2014 - 2015 and 2015 – 2016 academic years. For each resident-entry, data was collected on the postgraduate year of the resident, name of the training program, and the type of error reported. Methods Results Table 2 : ACGME Deficit Core Competency as a Cause of Disciplinary Action Background Despite national and institutional efforts, the frequency of housestaff error reporting remains low, especially in light of the rate of medical error experienced (18-45% in studies). This suggests that more comprehensive GME curricular efforts in quality/safety are needed. The overall increase and larger representation of PGY2 reporting may be due to increased educational efforts targeting new housestaff at our institution, in response to the ACGME CLER program. Conclusion 77of 439 residents submitted 169 reports in 2014-15, representing 1.22% of all institutional IR entries and a per-resident entry rate of 2.19. In 2015-16, 112 of 443 residents submitted 192 reports, representing 1.27% of all entries and a per-resident entry rate of 1.71. Total housestaff reporting increased by 45% and their reports increased by 13.6% over the two years. The reports represented a large variety of event categories (Figure 1) and programs (Figure 2). Report entry peaked at the PGY2 level in both years (Figure 3).