Background: Internal medicine residents face multiple barriers to participating in and documenting goals of care (GOC) meetings in the intensive care unit (ICU). Barriers include heavy workloads, need for urgent stabilization of critically ill patients, and inadequate communication skills training. Guidelines recommend regularly conducting and documenting GOC meetings for critically ill patients, to facilitate communication [...]

Background: Writing and presenting case reports provides opportunity for scholarly activities and promotes scientific writing and critical thinking. This study assesses Internal Medicine residents’ perceived benefits, challenges, and barriers regarding writing and presenting case reports. Methods: A Qualtrics survey was emailed to total 125 Internal Medicine Residents of the Medical College of Wisconsin. The survey [...]

Background: Resident work rounds (RWR) serve as the venue for team-based patient interaction, subsequent patient care planning, and education through didactics and observation. However, the expectations of RWR are unclear; do residents continue to see patients and is teaching still expected? If not, what barriers exist? Few studies examining RWR structure have been done however [...]

Background: Feedback on clinical management and diagnostic accuracy may enhance physicians’ learning and reduce diagnostic error. Residents on night admitting rotations rarely receive feedback on their clinical management and seldom have the opportunity to reflect on their patients’ clinical courses. Barriers include the lack of a structured approach to feedback and reflection, discontinuous training environments, [...]

Background: Feedback and teaching are critical to the development of clinical skills. Although they occur with regularity on medical wards, learners infrequently recognize them (Kogan et al. 2000). Feedback has been defined as providing information related to a learner’s performance that is intended to guide future thinking and behavior (Ende 1983, Shute 2008); while teaching [...]

Background: The prevalence of gout has risen in recent decades despite advancements in therapeutic options due to several reasons, including lack of adherence to treatment guidelines by physicians and patients’ poor perception and adherence to therapy. We aim to assess the beliefs and knowledge of gout management in Internal Medicine residents, to investigate the gaps, [...]

Background: New ACGME Core requirements require active resident engagement in patient safety. Our institution’s most recent AHRQ Culture of Safety survey revealed poor ratings from residents for closed-loop feedback on event reports they had submitted. Since hospitalists are well-positioned to foster improvement in the culture of safety, we developed an interprofessional intervention in response. Purpose: [...]

Background: Family centered rounds (FCR) was first defined by Sisterhen in 2007 as “interdisciplinary work rounds at the bedside in which patient and family share in the control of the management plan as well as in the evaluation of the process itself.”1 Since then, recognition of the benefits of FCR have led to widespread adoption. [...]

Background: The University of Colorado Hospital (UCH) fails to meet the National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) benchmarks for central line utilization rates and central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSI). Peripherally inserted central catheters (PICCs) are central lines that are overused and misused at UCH. Overuse of PICC lines increases the risks of CLABSI and PICC-associated deep [...]

Background: Obtaining blood work through venipuncture is an important part of the diagnosis and management of hospitalized patients. Through formal and informal patient complaints, we found that patients admitted to the University of Colorado Hospital (UCH) report an excessive number of venipunctures for laboratory blood sampling. This results in overuse of resources, excess patient discomfort, [...]