#tbt the 2017 Accreditation Council of Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) conference in Orlando, FL. I was honored to receive the David C. Leach Award for our resident-led quality improvement project at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, WA.
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A multidisciplinary team of residents, nurses, surgeons, and administrators convened to improve the postoperative handover process. Rather than simply creating and requiring the use of a checklist, we gathered input from housestaff, sought feedback critical to implementation, and studied the compliance and use of a structured handover protocol. The project took three months of brainstorming, a year to carry out the project, and collect data, and now more than three years to analyze, write, and vet it for peer-reviewed journal submission, amidst our personal and career objectives.
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Quality improvement pojects are now required for residents completing their training at a US allopathic medical institution. Compared to traditional research projects in which discoveries can take years to translate to a change in practice, quality improvement initiatives focus on implementing innovative solutions or protocols within the span of days to months. They also tend to be exempt or expedited by institution research regulatory boards.
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More work is needed to help people translate their results to researched-based scientific journals.

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