Developing a weekly patient safety and quality meeting in a medium-sized GI surgical unit in the United Kingdom

Abstract

Background: Morbidity and Mortality (M&M) meetings are advocated as part of good surgical practice, but have been criticised as a method of improving patient outcomes. Several groups have re-designed the format of M&M meetings to improve reporting of complications, near misses and maximise learning points. As a medium sized department of 8 GI surgeons in the UK, we wished to explore and discuss the complications encountered in our clinical practice in more detail than currently available in our monthly M&M/audit meeting, in order to try and improve the quality of care we deliver to our patients. This article describes the practicalities of introducing a weekly meeting and reports on the initial data generated from the patients discussed.Methods: Four groups of general surgical patients (both elective and acute) are discussed in depth at the weekly meeting- a) patients whose length of in-patient stay is greater than 7 days (as a surrogate marker of a complicated surgical episode), b) unplanned patient readmissions to our hospital (under any specialty) within 30 days of a previous discharge from the GI surgical service, c) all GI surgical inpatient deaths and d) returns to theatre within the same admission (either planned or unplanned).Results: The initial data generated from the meeting first six months of the meeting are presented e.g.- 302 length of stay greater than 7 days patient episodes (attributable to complications in 26%, normal variant of disease in 59% and social reasons delaying discharge in 15%).Conclusions: We feel that these weekly meetings can be helpful in addressing both patient safety and quality issues in more depth than the traditional M&M format, as well as being a valuable training resource for both surgical trainees and consultants alike. © 2014 Davies et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.