I had come to Morning Meeting to learn about hypothermia, and the stories I heard answered some of my questions and gave me new avenues to consider. But what left me captivated was the nature of the meeting itself.
7:55 am. People trickled into the conference room. Slowly, all the seats filled, leaving only standing room. The physicians, 20 or so, sat around the conference table in the center of the room. The rest of us and the medical students sat in chairs set against the 4 walls of the room.
8:00 am. The doctors started speaking.
“A boy was brought in…”
We worked our way through the little boy’s story, learning about his illness prior to his arrival, hearing what happened during his time in the hospital, and his outcome.
“A baby girl was brought in with a fever…”
This was Morning Meeting. Mistakes were laid bare, yet this wasn’t a place for rebuke. It was a place for learning from those mistakes so that the 40 or 50 doctors and medical students in the room wouldn’t repeat them. Whether it’s here in the conference room in Kamuzu Central Hospital or back home on the 3rd floor of Texas Children’s Hospital, there’s a burning question that never goes away.
“Why?”
Why that outcome? Why did that patient present in that way? Was there something else that could have been done? Morbidity and Mortality conferences, M&M’s, are a reminder that in the world of medicine, we’re constantly students. Our operating rooms, our patients, our colleagues are all our teachers.