With a focus on education and opportunities for improvement, hospital hosts quarterly Morbidity and Mortality conferences for staff

As a part of the Clinical Center's focus on high reliability and continuous improvement, the hospital held it's third systems-based Morbidity and Mortality (M & M) conference this year, on Oct. 19, in the Masur Auditorium. About 300 employees, from the Clinical Center and other institutes and centers, attended.

M & M conferences provide a forum for medical care teams to explore, evaluate and analyze patient care outcomes in the hospital. Professionals can learn from complications, errors and unanticipated outcomes and develop more effective responses for the future. These conferences can also help identify potential systems issues that can be barriers to care such as outdated policies or procedural slowdowns.

While the Clinical Center has held M & M sessions in the past, they were often directed toward the specific care groups on a certain patient case.

Recognizing the enormous training potential they hold for employee, Clinical Center CEO Dr. James Gilman revitalized the case reviews and created an environment for any staff member to attend and revisit errors to gain insight without blame or derision.

"This was a different kind of M & M," Gilman stated, when mentioning the April conference at a Clinical Center Research Hospital Board Meeting. "This was not your shaming, naming and blaming M & M."

M & M Conferences are an Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education mandated educational series that occur regularly at all institutions that have residency training programs.