Medical students do not always feel competent when it comes to patient safety concepts. In this study of German medical students, most understood the importance of patient safety, though few could identify concrete patient safety topics, such as near miss events or conditions that contribute to errors. Incorporating patient safety formally into medical education could improve students’ competence in these concepts.

Black patients who experience racism from their providers report receiving lower quality of care. Black public health students were asked about racist behaviors exhibited by their healthcare providers and the impacts the behaviors had on their care. The students recommend education and accountability to reduce providers’ racist attitudes, as well as increasing the number of Black clinicians.  

Clinical reasoning is now a common method to improve diagnostic decision making, and several tools have been developed to assess learners’ clinical reasoning. In this study, hospital faculty and pediatric interns used the Assessment of Reasoning Tool (ART) to assess, teach, and guide feedback on the interns’ clinical reasoning. Faculty and interns report the ART framework was highly structured, specific, formative, and facilitated goal setting.

Racism exacerbates health disparities and threatens patient safety. This article summarizes the relationship between structural racism and health disparities in the United States and highlights how racism impacts health care delivery and health outcomes for patients with sickle cell disease.

Training in patient safety concepts is an important element of health professional education. This article describes learning objectives on patient safety generated by experts on patient safety and medical education. These learning objectives showed high correspondence with the WHO Patient Safety Curriculum Guide’s learning objectives.

Research with medical and surgical residents has shown they are frequently reluctant to speak up about safety and unprofessional behavior they observe. This study asked emergency medicine residents about their speaking up behaviors. Using the Speaking Up Climate (SUC)-Safe and SUC-Prof surveys, residents reported generally neutral responses to speaking up, more favorable than their medical and surgical counterparts. In line with other studies, residents were more likely to speak up about patient safety than about unprofessional behaviors.

The effectiveness of incident reporting systems is hindered by underreporting. This cohort study describes the characteristics of incident reports submitted by trainees in a large academic medical center. From October 2019 through December 2021, trainees submitted nearly 200 incident reports, primarily describing unprofessional interactions. Findings suggest that awareness and support for the online incident reporting system among trainees was high.

Learning to recover after a medical error is an important component of medical training. This qualitative study, which included postgraduate trainees from Europe and Canada, concluded that failure represents a valuable learning opportunity, but noted the importance of perceived intentions if trainees judge that their supervisors have allowed them to fail.

Research into the impact of racism on health outcomes has increased in recent years, but there has been less emphasis on ageism or the intersection of ageism and racism. This commentary highlights the ways racism (e.g., clinical algorithms), ageism (e.g., proposed measures to ration care) and the intersection of the two (increased morbidity and mortality of COVID-19 on older people of color) impacts health outcomes. Recommendations for current clinicians and health profession educators are provided.

The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) includes work hour restrictions in its Common Program Requirements. The focus of this review is the impact of resident work hour restrictions on patient- and resident-level outcomes. Shorter shift hours were associated with some improved resident outcomes and but no association with patient outcomes.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to dramatic changes in healthcare delivery. The multi-country PRICOV-19 study evaluated how primary care practices reorganized their day-to-day work during the pandemic and the impacts on patient safety culture. This study compared training vs. non-training primary care practices and found that training practices had a stronger safety culture during the pandemic.

Patients and clinicians may hold implicit gender biases and rate women clinicians more negatively. In this study, adverse event reports written about residents were reviewed to determine if resident gender was associated with different types and frequency of incident reports. The most comment complaint about men physicians involved a medical error, while the most common complaint type about women included a communication-related event. Additionally, women were more frequently identified by name only, without a title such as “doctor”.

Medication errors can be common among medical trainees. Using semi-structured qualitative interviews, this study identified factors influencing suboptimal prescribing by medical residents during overnight coverage, including time pressures, perceived pressure and fear of judgement, clinical acuity, and communication issues between care team members.

The introduction of new technology can have mixed consequences on staff workflows and patient safety. Focus groups of residents and nurses in a California children’s hospital sought to assess the advantages and shortcomings of secure text messaging systems (STMS) on teamwork, patient safety, and clinician well-being. Guidelines to reduce drawbacks are described.

Several countries have resident duty hour (RDH) restrictions and there are numerous publications examining the impact of RDH on patient safety. This study used two online discussion forums (one primarily in the United States and the other in Canada) to assess resident perceptions of RDH. Themes included its impact on residents’ education and clinician well-being, and, worryingly, discussions of not reporting RDH violations.

In 2022, the Accreditation Council on Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) began requiring residency programs to provide instruction and experience in pain management for internal medicine trainees. Residency program directors were surveyed in 2019 about whether and how they provide instruction and experience to residents in safe opioid prescribing (SOP) and treatment of opioid use disorder (OUD). Most programs required didactic learning, but few required clinical experience. Given that the ACGME requirement is now in place, the researchers suggest many programs may be ill-prepared to meet the requirement.

Burnout is a significant problem among medical residents. This literature review characterizes the state of the evidence regarding resident burnout and professionalism. The authors discuss the evidence supporting the relationship between burnout and medical errors, poor quality patient care, and poor academic performance.

Clinicians involved in adverse events may experience feelings of guilt, shame, and inadequacy; this is referred to as “second victim” phenomenon. In this study of pediatric surgeons and surgical trainees, 84% experienced a poor patient outcome. Responses to the adverse event varied by level of experience (e.g., resident, attending), gender, and age.