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GIA 2004 Excellence Winner
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Laura Stephenson Carter,
Associate Editor, Dartmouth Medicine Magazine
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The Robert G. Fenley Writing Award - General Staff Writing
Dartmouth Medical School/
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center
Puzzling Over Medical Mysteries
Residents and faculty members rave about Dartmouth's Morbidity and Mortality
conferences as a valuable teaching and clinical tool. This story takes
an inside look at an "M&M" conference at DHMC.
Morbidity and mortality conferences represent one form of clinical Q
& A activities. Patient complications and deaths are discussed for
the purpose of educating staff, residents, and medical students. State
statute protects the discussions of what might have gone wrong.
Goals
- As the medical profession evolved, physicians grew accustomed to discussing
their errors at mortality conferences where autopsy findings were presented.
By 1983, the ACGME began requiring that accredited residency programs
conduct a weekly review of all complications and deaths.
- M&Ms are especially educational for the residents as they get
to watch experts with years of experience openly wrestle with difficult
clinical problems.
Results
- "Presenting a case at M&M lets patients teach providers how to
be better doctors. It is a chance to make a patient who touched your
heart touch the hearts and souls of others," according to a fourth-year
resident who participated in the session.
- "It provides a chance to learn how someone else might put together
the same facts in an entirely different way because of their own knowledge
base and experience," said a faculty member who attends the conferences.
Read the full narrative (Word document)
Contact: Laura Stephenson Carter, Associate Editor, dartmed@dartmouth.edu
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