"You Will Miss Your Grandmother's Funeral": Surviving Medical School, Just in Time to Burnout

The abounding negativity of my first year of medical school was best exemplified by a preparatory class entitled "How to Survive the Spring Semester." Physician burnout is an epidemic that may begin in the classrooms and cadaver labs of medical schools with scare tactics, fatalistic messaging, and a pervasive "culture of burnout." Medical education's axiom-"if I suffered through it, so should you"-is a persistent disservice to students who must survive medical school, just in time to burnout as physicians. I wonder if combating physician burnout could start with medical schools, which must stop sowing the seeds of burnout in students. Medical educators can start by reevaluating the words and tone they strike with the physicians of the future.

Care Quality and Spending Among Commercially Insured Children With Disabilities

OBJECTIVE

To identify opportunities to improve care value for children with disabilities (CWD), we examined CWD prevalence within a commercially insured population and compared outpatient care quality and annual health plan spending levels for CWD relative to children with complex medical conditions without disabilities; children with chronic conditions that are not complex; and children without disabling, complex, or chronic conditions.

METHODS

This cross-sectional study comprised 1,118,081 person-years of Blue Cross Blue Shield Massachusetts data for beneficiaries aged 1 to 19years old during 2008 to 2012. We combined the newly developed and validated Children with Disabilities Algorithm with the Pediatric Medical Complexity Algorithm to identify CWD and non-CWD subgroups. We used 14 validated or National Quality Forum-endorsed measures to assess outpatient care quality and paid claims to examine annual plan spending levels and components.

RESULTS

CWD constituted 4.5% of all enrollees. Care quality for CWD was between 11% and 59% for 8 of 14 quality measures and >80% for the 6 remaining measures and was generally comparable to that for non-CWD subgroups. Annual plan spending among CWD was a median and mean 23% and 53% higher than that for children with complex medical conditions without disabilities, respectively; CWD mean and median values were higher than for all other groups as well.

CONCLUSIONS

CWD were prevalent in our commercially insured population. CWD experienced suboptimal levels of care, but those levels were comparable to non-CWD groups. Improving the care value for CWD involves a deeper understanding of what higher spending delivers and additional aspects of care quality.

Racial, Ethnic, and Socioeconomic Disparities in Patient Safety Events for Hospitalized Children

OBJECTIVES

Previous studies have revealed racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in quality of care and patient safety. However, these disparities have not been examined in a pediatric inpatient environment by using a measure of clinically confirmed adverse events (AEs). In this study, we do so using the Global Assessment of Pediatric Patient Safety (GAPPS) Trigger Tool.

METHODS

GAPPS was applied to medical records of randomly selected pediatric patients discharged from 16 hospitals in the Pediatric Research in Inpatient Settings Network across 4 US regions from January 2007 to December 2012. Disparities in AEs for hospitalized children were identified on the basis of patient race/ethnicity (black, Latino, white, or other; N = 17 336 patient days) and insurance status (public, private, or self-pay/no insurance; N = 19 030 patient days).

RESULTS

Compared with hospitalized non-Latino white children, hospitalized Latino children experienced higher rates of all AEs (Latino: 30.1 AEs per 1000 patient days versus white: 16.9 AEs per 1000 patient days; P ≤ .001), preventable AEs (Latino: 15.9 AEs per 1000 patient days versus white: 8.9 AEs per 1000 patient days; P = .002), and high-severity AEs (Latino: 12.6 AEs per 1000 patient days versus white: 7.7 AEs per 1000 patient days; P = .02). Compared with privately insured children, publicly insured children experienced higher rates of preventable AEs (public: 12.1 AEs per 1000 patient days versus private: 8.5 AEs per 1000 patient days; P = .02). No significant differences were observed among other groups.

CONCLUSIONS

The GAPPS analysis revealed racial and/or ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in rates of AEs experienced by hospitalized children across a broad range of geographic and hospital settings. Further investigation may reveal underlying mechanisms of these disparities and could help hospitals reduce harm.

Cancer Survivorship for Primary Care Annotated Bibliography

Long-term cancer survivorship care is a relatively new and rapidly advancing field of research. Increasing cancer survivorship rates have created a huge population of long-term cancer survivors whose cancer-specific needs challenge healthcare infrastructure and highlight a significant deficit of knowledge and guidelines in transitional care from treatment to normalcy/prolonged survivorship. As the paradigm of cancer care has changed from a fixation on the curative to the maintenance on long-term overall quality of life, so to, has the delineation of responsibility between oncologists and primary care physicians (PCPs). As more patients enjoy long-term survival, PCPs play a more comprehensive role in cancer care following acute treatment. To this end, this annotated bibliography was written to provide PCPs and other readers with an up-to-date and robust base of knowledge on long-term cancer survivorship, including definitions and epidemiological information as well as specific considerations and recommendations on physical, psychosocial, sexual, and comorbidity needs of survivors. Additionally, significant information is included on survivorship care, specifically Survivorship Care Plans (SPCs) and their evolution, utilization by oncologists and PCPs, and current gaps, as well as an introduction to patient navigation programs. Given rapid advancements in cancer research, this bibliography is meant to serve as current baseline reference outlining the state of the science.