Morbidity and mortality meetings: gold, silver or bronze?

Abstract

Taking steps to standardize and incorporate the enabling factors into M&M meetings will ensure that the valuable time spent reviewing M&M is used effectively to improve patient care.

10 Evidence that altered redox status results in KCa3.1 channel reduced endothelial cell surface expression

“…1 Paul Fraser, 1 Anas Bani Khalaf, 1 Giovanni Mann, 1 Matthew Smith, 2 Geraldine Clough. Introduction Endothelial derived hyperpolarization (EDH) is an important path to vasodilatation especially in small arteries, and is more important in women and the elderly.…”

“…Our previous work has shown that this becomes impaired in mice that had experienced a high fat diet during gestation up to weaning, with concomitant reduction in endothelial surface KCa3.1 expression. 1 We have tested the idea that altered redox status affects the location of KCa3.1 in human dermal microvascular endothelial cells (HDMECs). Methods HDMECs were obtained from PromoCell (Heidelberg, Germany) and cultured in MV2 growth medium containing 1% penicillin-streptomycin in 5% O 2 , 5% CO 2 at 37°C to passage 6 and 7 in the SCI-tive Physiological Oxygen Workstation from Baker Ruskinn (Maine, USA) for at least 5 days before experiments.…”

CIRSE Standards of Practice on Conducting Meetings on Morbidity and Mortality

“…The M&M conference can be a forum for identifying such issues to provide a basis to implement change and improve patient safety. Contemporary M&M meetings form an important part of the organisation's governance framework that supports individual learning and encourages examination of current systems and processes [6,7,[9][10][11][12][13].…”

“…Despite the growing evidence and the general consensus that M&M meetings are useful and a necessary part of good clinical practice, there is wide variation in the format and level of participation [9,12,20]. There is also limited guidance on how they should be conducted in order to maximise benefit [1,10,12,13].…”

11 Uptick/downtick – the future of morbidity and mortality meetings

“…While they should confer improvement in education and patient care, they often 'lack defined structure, resource support and…heterogeneity in case evaluation'. 1 UK critical care has an embedded routine audit data collection on outcomes which is exported to a central body, Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre (ICNARC), for cleaning and analysis. This data is submitted monthly but is returned on a quarterly basis preventing the timely identification of deaths or survivals that are unexpected (based on case-mix).…”