Amy Fahrenkopf
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Speaker: Amy Fahrenkopf, MD, a senior associate in the Washington, D.C. office of McKinsey & Company, is focused on public sector health care delivery systems and health policy. Since joining the Firm, she has developed, established and implemented a nursing recruiting and retention strategy for a large public health care system. Further on she developed a quality benchmarking service for global health care systems, and helped lead a strategic transformation of the largest payor/provider in the U.S.
Amy received a BA in History and a MD with honors from Yale University. She also holds a MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health with a concentration in Health Policy. She completed residency training in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital Boston. Following residency, Amy became an Instructor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and was on staff at Children’s Hospital Boston as a pediatric hospitalist. As a member of the Harvard Work Hours, Health and Safety Working Group, her research focused on patient safety, quality improvement and physician working conditions. She was founder and director of the Patient Safety Curriculum and co-founder and faculty advisor for the Humanism Curriculum at Children’s Hospital Boston. She is Board certified in Pediatrics.
Title: "Rates of medication errors among depressed and burnt out residents: a prospective cohort study"
Short summary: "Depression and burnout are highly prevalent among house officers worldwide and across specialties, possibly as a result of the stresses of resident training, such as sleep deprivation. A few studies have examined the relation between burnout in residents and self reported medical errors, but this relation has not been validated. Similarly, the relation between depression and medical errors has not been quantified systematically. Through a prospective cohort study, we determined that depressed residents made 6.2 times as many medical errors per resident month as residents who were not depressed. Burned out residents were not found to have an increased error rate. Mental health problems affect quality of life and lead to loss of productivity in the workplace. Depressed health care providers may also put patients at risk of unintentional harm."