More than 50 students, residents and fellows participated in the 8th annual Vijay Babu Rayudu Quality and Patient Safety Day with poster and oral presentations on May 21 at the School of Medicine.
The event provides an opportunity to present research and learn from experts in the field of patient safety.
Mallika Joshi, MS 3, and Kayla Reifel, MS3, captured the top student honors for their abstracts, while Megan Hamner, M.D., and Cree Kachelski, M.D., received the top awards for residents and fellows. The four were selected to give oral presentations of their research.
Joshi presented on “Improving the Sleep Quality of UMKC Medical Students: A Quality Improvement Project.” Reifel presented a project titled “Improving Breast Cancer Related Lymphedema Detection – Creating a Standard Practice for Preoperative Arm Measurements.”
In the resident/fellows category, Hamner, a second-year pediatric infectious disease fellow, gave an oral prestation on her winning abstract, “Improving Skin and Soft Tissue Infection Antibiotic Duration Concordance with National Guidelines in Pediatric Urgent Care Clinics.” Kachelski, a second-year pediatric emergency medicine fellow, presented “Improving time to antibiotics in open fractures in the Children’s Mercy Emergency Department.”
Three students, Parth Patel, MS3, Lakshmi Pryiya, MS5, and Aarya Ramprasad, MS3, and three residents/fellows, Bemjamin Hoag, M.D., Raed Qarajeh, M.D., and Ray Segebrecht, M.D., received honorable mention for their poster presentations.
A complete list of student and resident/fellows oral and poster presentations and videos of the oral presentations are available on the School of Medicine research web site.
Jennifer S. Myers, M.D., professor of clinical medicine and the director of Quality and Safety Education for the Department of Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, gave a keynote address. She is the Director of Penn’s Center for Healthcare Improvement and Patient Safety (CHIPS) fellowship program and oversees all aspects of quality and safety education for the Department of Medicine.
Myers talked about the history of the quality improvement and patient safety movement and its influence on medical education. She also discussed health and health care equity as a cornerstone of quality health care.
She said the health care delivery system has several goals for providing quality care in that it be safe, timely, effective, efficient, equitable and patient centered. However, she said that “equity has been the forgotten name of health care quality until very recently.”
“I do think academic medicine is evolving to embrace clinical quality and safety, but I think we still have work to do,” Myers said. “Achieving health equity and health care equity are integral to this work.”
