Graduate Medical Education as a Lever for Collaborative Change: One Institution's Experience with a Campuswide Patient Safety Initiative

The 2013 closure of a public hospital in Baton Rouge, LA transformed graduate medical education (GME) at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center (OLOL). Administrators were tasked with incorporating residents into patient safety and quality improvement initiatives to fulfill regulatory obligations. This report outlines our experiences as we built these patient safety and quality improvement initiatives in a rapidly expanding independent academic medical center. We joined the Alliance of Independent Academic Medical Centers (AIAMC) to meet and learn from national peers. To fulfill the scholarly activity requirement of the AIAMC's National Initiative IV, we formed a multidisciplinary team to develop a patient safety education project. Prioritized monthly team meetings allowed for project successes to be celebrated and circulated within the organization. The public-private partnership that more than quadrupled the historic size of GME at OLOL has, in the past 2 years, led to the development of an interdisciplinary team. This team has expanded to accommodate residency program leadership from across the campus. Our National Initiative IV project won a national award and inspired several follow-up initiatives. In addition, this work led to the formation of a Patient Safety and Clinical Quality Improvement fellowship that matched its first fellow in 2015. Through the commitment and support of hospital and medical education leaders, as well as a focus on promoting cultural change through scholarly activity, we were able to greatly expand patient safety and quality improvement efforts in our institution.