A Novel Standardized Morbidity and Mortality Process to Promote Discourse, Improve Education, and Facilitate Practice...

The morbidity and mortality conference is essential to medical education and quality improvement. Ideally, the conference is inclusive, judgment-free, and focused on practice improvement. In reality, it may not meet these goals. We reimagined the process by standardizing presentations and creating an oversight committee to improve the perceived value of the conference and identify opportunities for improvement. This study evaluates the subjective impact of the redesigned process at our institution and provides a blueprint for our reproducible model.

We created a faculty and resident committee to review all submitted cases, implemented a standardized presentation template and moderating structure, and tracked quality improvement measures from proposed improvement initiatives. Attitudes toward the conference, including perceived quality/relevance, identification of potential systems changes, inclusiveness, and educational value, were assessed among faculty and trainees using pre- and postintervention Likert-style surveys.

Of 45 eligible department members, 41 (91%) completed the preintervention and 36 (80%) completed the postintervention survey. We found a statistically significant improvement in all questions between pre- and postintervention surveys except on the question about the conference environment being nonthreatening, which also improved but was not statistically significant. The overall average answer improved on the postintervention survey compared to the preintervention survey (3.36 vs 4.20, P < .001). These trends were similar regardless of attendee role and gender.

Redesigning and standardizing the morbidity and mortality conference with greater attention to education, inclusion, systems change, and quality improvement improves the attitudes of conference attendees and increases the perceived value of the conference.