Residents' Suggestions for Reducing Errors in Teaching Hospitals

The authors propose several simple and inexpensive ways to reduce errors in teaching hospitals. Their suggestions include computerized procedures to sign out patients when residents go off duty, standardized placement and composition of medical charts and equipment, and the replacement of “see one, do one, teach one” with a rational system for training residents to perform procedures. The Institute of Medicine's 2000 report To Err Is Human precipitated a firestorm of publicity on the issue of medical errors. 1 On the basis of the Harvard Medical Practice Study 2 and a similar analysis of Utah and Colorado hospitals, 3 the report concluded that as many as 98,000 deaths occur annually in U.S. hospitals as a direct result of medical errors. This figure exceeds the number of deaths attributable annually to AIDS, motor vehicle accidents, or breast cancer. 1 Subsequent critiques have suggested that this estimate might be inaccurate, since some of the deaths documented in the original studies may have been . . .