Morbidity & Mortality

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For other uses, see Morbidity and Mortality

Morbidity & Mortality conferences are traditional, recurring conferences held by medical services at academic medical centers and by most large private medical and surgical practices. They are essentially peer reviews of mistakes occurring during the care of patients. The objectives of a well-run M&M conference are: to learn from complications and errors, to modify behavior and judgment based on previous experiences, and to prevent repetition of errors leading to complications. Conferences are nonpunitive and focus on the goal of improved patient care. M&M conferences occur with regular frequency, often weekly, biweekly or monthly, and highlight recent cases and identify areas of improvement for clinicians involved in the case. They are also important for identifying systems issues (e.g., outdated policies, changes in patient identification procedures, arithmetic errors, etc.) which affect patient care.

Morbidity & Mortality (M&M) conferences have a long tradition in the practice of medicine, having originated in the early 1900s with Dr. Ernest Codman at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. It is almost 100 years since Ernest Codman wrote a monograph on this subject, which caused his colleagues to banish him from the Massachusetts General Hospital. Ernest Codman's ideas contributed to the standardization of hospital practices—including a case report system that ascribed responsibility for adverse outcomes— by the American College of Surgeons in 1916. As the medical profession evolved, physicians grew accustomed to discussing their errors at mortality conferences, where autopsy findings were presented, and in published case reports. By 1983, the ACGME began requiring that accredited residency programs conduct a weekly review of all complications and deaths.

See also

• Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a medical publication
• Morbidity & Mortality Rounds on the Web, a monthly web journal about M&M published by the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Includes cases and perspectives from patient safety experts.
• My Tuscaloosa Heart, My First Step and My Big Bird, episodes of the medical comedy TV series Scrubs that feature an M&M conferences
• Medical drama ER has depicted M&M conferences on a number of occasions, the most notable being one in which Dr Mark Greene presented an emergency delivery which resulted in the death of the mother (seen in the episode Love's Labor Lost), and one in which Dr Peter Benton is suspended after pushing away his superior Dr Morgenstern from the operating table in the middle of a surgery (which later failed, resulting in the patients death).Template:Med-org-stub