Quality? Safety? Stop Being Naïve.

The first day of our inpatient medicine rotation, the Emergency Department (ED) admitted a patient to a general medical floor without notifying our rounding team. We used the institution’s system improvement tracking software to draw attention to communication breakdown in the interest of patient safety. This piece illustrates how there is a prominent hierarchy in medicine; it is inherent to the framework of the way in which hospitals function. A discussion ensues with our attending physician supervisor on our patient medicine service. During this discussion, we ponder whether it is possible to impact quality and safety from our position as resident physicians