Resource Center

Featuring: 

• Donald M. Berwick, MD, Former President and CEO, Institute for Healthcare Improvement
• Lucian L. Leape, MD, Chair, Lucian Leape Institute at NPSF, and Adjunct Professor of Health Policy, Harvard School of Public Health
• Dennis S. O’Leary, MD, President Emeritus, The Joint Commission
• Diane C. Pinakiewicz, President, Lucian Leape Institute at NPSF

What do today’s medical students need to know to safely and effectively take care of patients? This question isn’t really a new one. But in recent years, the focus on making sure students are prepared to practice in an environment dominated by advancements in medical treatment has been coupled with something equally urgent: the need for newly minted MDs to listen effectively, to engage in difficult conversations, to work as members of teams, and to practice with sharpened awareness and skills drawn from the very latest in improvement science and patient safety.​

None of these changes can come about overnight. IHI’s “virtual” Open School is starting to make a difference in the lives and skills of students across the health professions, and now the Lucian Leape Institute at the National Patient Safety Foundation has issued a groundbreaking report that lays out an important blueprint for change. Unmet Needs: Teaching Physicians to Provide Safe Patient Care may be the most important call for medical education reform since the Flexner Report in 1910. The principal authors of the report join Don Berwick and WIHI host, Madge Kaplan, for an important discussion of the key findings and recommendations in the report and a look at where reform of the sort called for can already be noted and applied more broadly.

Dennis O’Leary labels the current state of medical education as one of “producing square pegs for the delivery system’s round holes.” This is clearly not the future we want to embrace. This WIHI focuses on a timely conversation on one of the most important gateways to a better and safer health care system: medical education.