Patient Safety and Quality Resources

The SMFM Patient Safety & Quality Committee is charged with developing materials to assist maternal-fetal medicine subspecialists in leading quality and safety initiatives at hospital and organizational levels. Below are checklists, quality metrics, and additional resources developed by the committee.

Curriculum Guide for MFM Fellows

Education in patient safety and healthcare quality is essential to fellowship training in maternal-fetal medicine. To assist MFM fellows and fellowship program directors in achieving the educational objectives on patient safety and quality required by the Accreditation Council on Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), SMFM's Patient Safety & Quality Committee developed the following three tools: 

1. Curriculum Outline: summarizes the ACGME requirements, some suggested readings and activities for each requirement and a timeline for completion. 
2. Quality Improvement Project Toolkit: helps fellows design, implement, analyze, and report their own quality improvement projects
3. Primer on Patient Safety and Healthcare Quality for MFM Fellows: provides a brief synopsis of many essential topics in patient safety and healthcare quality. Each chapter is mentioned in the Curriculum Outline as a suggested reading during the appropriate month of fellowship.

Regular checklists—standardized, validated, evidence- or consensus-based processes—promote consistency in obstetrical care and provide safe, efficient, high-quality patient care. The SMFM Patient Safety & Quality Committee encourages our members to incorporate the checklists below into their clinical practice to help improve the safety dynamics of their hospital. The information in the SMFM Patient Safety Checklists should not be construed as dictation of an exclusive course of treatment or procedures to be ordered. Although the components of a particular checklist may be adapted to local resources, standardization of checklists within an institution is strongly encouraged.