ACGME Releases Pursuing Excellence Pathway Leaders Patient Safety Collaborative Report

The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) recently released its summary report of the Pursuing Excellence in Clinical Learning Environments (Pursuing Excellence) Pathway Leaders Patient Safety Collaborative.

“This report captures the innovation and dedication of the GME community in improving patient safety, which is central to the ACGME’s strategic directions of enhancing the clinical learning environment and interprofessional teamwork,” said Thomas J. Nasca, MD, MACP, president and chief executive officer.

The Collaborative launched in 2017 to design and test new approaches to increasing resident and fellow engagement in improving patient safety. The report describes how nine Sponsoring Institutions collaborated to enhance graduate medical education (GME) around patient safety and includes key concepts and lessons learned that can be implemented across the GME community.

The Collaborative participants noted several themes that emerged throughout the process. Highlights include:

• the importance of intentionally investing time to establish processes the clinical learning environment’s leadership and GME can use together to actively involve residents and fellows in addressing patient safety events;
• exposing residents and fellows to the clinical learning environment’s processes for patient safety event investigation, and actively involving them in problem solving, enabled the residents and fellows to recognize firsthand the value to both the clinical learning environment and to patients;
• enhanced learning and team function can be achieved by incorporating various interprofessional team member perspectives in analyzing patient safety events;
• the significance of initiating education in patient safety during residents’ and fellows’ first year so they are knowledgeable throughout their programs; and,
• empowerment of residents and fellows.

Seeking to build upon the momentum and successes of this initial effort, Pursuing Excellence expanded the Collaborative offerings to both extend the work of the first cohort of teams while simultaneously replicating the initial experience with a new cohort. This next phase of work will be shared in a future report.

Read the full report.