Medical Trainees and Patient Safety

Abstract

With changing hospital patient demographics and rapidly advancing health care technology, it is becoming increasingly important for health care systems to evolve to meet their new challenges. Medical trainees, as a vital health care resource, provide both elective and emergency medical care within acute health care facilities. Postgraduate training and medical team structure often place junior trainees at the forefront of identifying and responding to inpatient acute medical needs. This requires them to deal with issues ranging from the trivial to the more complicated and often subtle presentations of acute medical emergencies.Their ability to recognize these signs and alert and participate in the response to acute medical events with hospital medical emergency teams is crucial to minimizing serious adverse events for such patients.

For medical trainees to safely and efficiently fulfill their roles in emergent and elective patient care, undergraduate and postgraduate training will need to provide them with the appropriate skills, environment, balance between specialization and general medicine, and appropriate supervision.