Derek Blok, a second-year medical student at the Wayne State University School of Medicine, was selected to sit as a member on a subcommittee of the Society of General Internal Medicine's Clinical Practice Committee.
The Society of General Internal Medicine is an Alexandria, Va.-based medical society of 3,000 physicians who are the primary internal medicine faculty of medical schools and major teaching hospitals in the United States. The mission of the Quality and Patient Safety Subcommittee that Blok joined is to promote and disseminate scholarly activities in quality and patient safety work, and to facilitate training in safety and quality.
Blok is only the second student to be selected for the national committee. He was nominated by the Department of Internal Medicine's Associate Professor and Vice Chair of Education Diane Levine, M.D., an active SGIM member, because of his passion and commitment for patient safety and quality improvement.
"I'm very thankful to Dr. Levine for considering me for this position, and honored to have been selected to the Quality and Patient Safety Subcommittee. I'm excited to meet passionate people with much more experience in patient safety and quality improvement than me, and learn from them, as well as continue to work to make a positive difference in health care," Blok said.
Blok is a 2014 alumnus of the Telluride Patient Safety Summer Camp, a weeklong program of the Academy for Emerging Leaders in Patient Safety hosted by the Telluride Science Research Center in Colorado. He is an active member of the School of Medicine's chapter of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, and a member of that group's curriculum subcommittee. Blok and a team of fellow medical students are developing a curriculum in patient safety for first-year medical students, introducing students to the culture of safety and a variety of safety tools, including check lists and safety debriefs.
"I was struck when I discovered the amount of preventable harm that occurs to patients in the hospital by those of us who profess to be healing. The health care system is woefully behind many other industries in understanding our capacity for error and creating a system and a culture to prevent it," he said. "I am interested in evaluating health care systems, identifying system failures that tend to predispose to medical errors and developing improvements to prevent errors from occurring. Patients and their families turn to us in times of need, and we owe it to them and to ourselves to avoid setting ourselves up for failure."
Blok will serve on the subcommittee via monthly teleconferences, and will also have the opportunity to attend the annual SGIM meeting and additional regional meetings.