Background: Early career faculty often face challenges in setting personal and professional expectations, identifying effective mentorship, and quickly learning foundational skills in academic hospital medicine. We developed a “Faculty Boot Camp” to better orient new faculty at the beginning of the academic year with the goal of introducing them to key skills and concepts that [...]

Background: Despite the current focus on developing handoff training curricula to improve patient safety, rigorous assessments of handoffs remain scarce. Immersive simulations allow for the evaluation of communication skills, but few specifically account for common external threats to effective handoff performance. Our aim was to investigate the effects of these interruptions in an educational handoff [...]

Background: Teaching during bedside rounds is necessary to educate students and housestaff, but attendings rarely receive structured feedback on their teaching and rounding practices. We aimed to evaluate a Peer Observation Program and a structured bedside rounds observation tool. We hypothesized that participants would value observing their colleagues, report more effective preparation of the team [...]

Background: Code blue situations, being uncommon yet stressful, require excellent team communication; they can pose challenges for deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) clinicians, trainees, and interpreters, though DHH providers are a growing source of language-concordant care for DHH people, an underserved population. No known training specifically addresses such challenges. As educators and mentors, we [...]

Background: In 2014, UCLA Health embarked on a journey to train and inspire the future generation of medicine. The Healthcare Improvement & iNnovation in Quality (THINQ) Collaborative aims to radically shape care delivery by building transformative interdisciplinary platforms to catalyze and nurture innovation at UCLA that lead to large-scale impact. Further, THINQ aspires to engage [...]

Background: The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) realizes the importance of ambulatory medicine as an integral part of internal medicine (IM) training. Therefore, program requirements specify that at least one third of the training needs to be spent in ambulatory settings. ACGME requires residents to spend between 4 to 8 weeks in emergency [...]

Background: The transition of an experienced Registered Nurse into a novice hospital-based Nurse Practitioner (NP) is frequently met with trepidation. The novice NP is often uncertain if s/he possesses the level of clinical competency and scientific knowledge required to provide high quality evidence-based care to complex hospitalized patients. How does one ease the stress associated [...]

Background: Self-reflection facilitates the identification of performance gaps and is a critical step in the process of behavior change among physicians.  However, little is known about reflection and its relation to behavior change in hospital medicine (HM) continuing medical education (CME).  Our objectives were to identify associations between validated reflection scores and characteristics of CME [...]

Background: Medication errors are common, with more than half of patients estimated to have greater than or equal to one unintended medication discrepancy at hospital admission.  Medication reconciliation can identify errors. Although there has been significant investigation into the most effective logistical strategies for performing medicine reconciliation within the healthcare system, there is little investigation [...]

Background: Health care policy is currently under scrutiny due to health care reform, yet in our experience the majority of house staff have insufficient opportunity to learn about the environment they will soon be practicing medicine in. The ACGME attempts to address this through the Systems-based practice competency, but further guidance is lacking. Purpose: Our [...]