Dan Nguyen, MD
I think it’s time for family medicine to rock the boat. Family physicians, and especially family medicine residents, are uniquely qualified to promote quality improvement by standardizing patient care processes.
As a family medicine intern at an urban academic institution, these past 6 months have been a blur of rotations. Every 4 weeks, we start a new service and drink from a fire-hose of learning the intricacies of “how-to-be-a resident.” Our intern training is the most diverse; we rotate through inpatient services in OBGYN, pediatrics, family medicine, internal medicine, general surgery, intensive care, and the emergency department.
For inpatient services, there are common tasks that all residents perform. We answer pages, place admission orders, write progress notes, discharge patients, sign-out the patient lists, etc. We have access to the same electronic medical record, the same resources, and are unified by an academic institution.
What dawned on me is that every service seems to coordinate patient care completely differently. Every 4 weeks, I would re-learn how to do the same types of tasks but with different methodology. The most glaring disparities I noticed were in how different services handle transitions of care, especially patient sign-out.
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