Time to bring back morbidity and mortality conferences
My post on the changing culture of medicine as reflected in the way we talk about our errors in M&Ms is up at kevinMD. http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2014/07/time-bring-back-morbidity-mortality-conferences.html
Morbidity & Mortality Conference, a post mortem
When things go wrong in medicine, as they invariably do, we try to figure out what went wrong, and why. We try to learn if there’s anything we could have done better and what we should do next time. It used to be, in the days of the Giants, that the physician responsible for the patient … Continue reading
Physician Compensation
Doctors are burned out and they don’t enjoy their job as much as they used to. But looking broadly, physicians are still spared the economic difficulties and loss of autonomy that are present in most other sectors where people are still lucky enough to be employed. There are issues that doctors rarely face: unemployment, inability … Continue reading
Slow Medicine
Time heals all wounds, they say, or, in medicine, if not all, then many. But with our improved efficiency and throughput of patients, we fail to allow this most magical treatment to work. The pace and intensity of medicine has increased exponentially over the past several decades. We see more doctors, have more procedures, take … Continue reading
Need Oxygen to Smoke
Need Oxygen to Smoke? my editorial in the Salt Lake Tribune on the difficulty of tobacco cessation. What do you think about the policy at the Cleveland Clinic and other large employers that refuse to hire smokers? Below are my links that were embedded in editorial, but for some reason SLC trib removes them. …Even … Continue reading
Doctors Can Only Give So Much
editorial in SLC Tribune I called it “The Depressed Doctor” in homage to David Foster Wallace and his short story, “The Depressed Person.” The SLC Tribune titled it: “Doctors Can Only Give So Much.” Here’s a link to the Schwartz foundation and more about Schwartz Rounds.
Brain Transplant
When I was in Boston, I had a patient with a brain tumor and two adult sons. She had a malignant, progressive brain tumor and had been unresponsive for months. Her prognosis was poor. One son, I’ll call him Peter, thought she would have wanted to be DNR/DNI: if her heart stops, if her breathing … Continue reading
What I Learned at the ATP Reunion Conference Feb 2012
Hi all, happy valentine’s day! I hope you’re all doing well. It was fun to meet up with some of our class for the reunion conference. While this conference was not the life-altering event our class was, I still found it useful and thought I’d share some of the things I learned at the conference. … Continue reading
What I learned at the ATP Course Spring 2011
[An email to my fellow classmates at the Advanced Training Program in Healthcare Quality and Delivery run by Brent James, MD at the Intermountain Healthcare Institute for Quality Improvement.] I hope you all arrived home safely. It has been a real privilege taking this course with you. After Tommy’s speech on Wednesday, my husband asked me … Continue reading
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