The Covid-19 pandemic made it harder for medical students to receive proper training once schools switched to virtual learning and students couldn’t access needed hands-on training.
Now, the problem of inexperienced clinicians entering the workforce is the top patient safety concern for 2024, according to a report released on Monday from the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) and ECRI, the largest nonprofit patient-safety organization in the US.
Clinicians who trained during the pandemic missed “significant learning experiences,” and up to 30% of nurses with fewer than two years of experience said they don’t feel well prepared to practice medicine on their own, according to the report. That lack of confidence, combined with burnout, insufficient training, and a lack of support, could lead to “preventable harm” for patients, the ECRI stated.
“Through no fault of their own, clinicians who started practicing medicine in the last several years didn’t have the same early experience as those who came before them—before the pandemic laid bare critical weaknesses in our healthcare system,” Marcus Schabacker, president and CEO of ECRI, said in a statement.
Medical residents received less training in high-risk areas such as surgical specialities, neurology, and anesthesia during the pandemic, according to the ECRI. Many of the nearly 400,000 nurses who were licensed during the pandemic also faced barriers to a proper education, including “a lack of important practice repetition, changes in orientation processes, rapidly changing policies and protocols, and increased workloads,” the report found.
That lack of experience could translate into safety concerns for patients. Only 33% of clinicians with less than a year of experience voluntarily reported one or more safety events in 2022, compared to 50% of clinicians with six to 10 years of experience, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, a division of the US Department of Health and Human Services.
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That disparity “may reflect reduced mindfulness around culture of safety among new clinicians,” and could be a sign that newly trained clinicians “lack a sense of urgency around safety event reporting,” the ECRI report stated.
Plus, ongoing healthcare worker shortages are making the transition into the medical field even harder for new clinicians, according to the report.
“At a time when new clinicians are relatively inexperienced, they are asked to do more and work longer, without enough senior clinicians in their network for support, guidance, and mentorship,” the report stated.
To remedy the issue, ECRI recommended that healthcare facilities take a number of steps, like working with academic institutions to create more opportunities for both hands-on learning and simulation-based training, as well as creating a workplace culture that emphasizes reporting safety concerns.
“Hospitals and health systems that are ECRI members have reported to us they’re very concerned about the current state of how newly trained clinicians are transitioned into practice,” Dheerendra Kommala, chief medical officer at ECRI, said in a statement. “More research is needed to quantify how this issue impacts patient safety outcomes. In the meantime, early indicators warn us to act now. Investments in this new generation of healthcare professionals will establish a stronger, more resilient workforce for decades to come.”