2008 Nemours Child Health Service Research Awardee

Christopher P. Landrigan, M.D., M.P.H.
Children's Hospital Boston/Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School

Christopher P. Landrigan, M.D., M.P.H., is a pediatric hospitalist and health services researcher with a particular interest in the quality of inpatient care, and the effects of healthcare providers' work hours, communication, and sleep deprivation on safety.  His initial work focused on the evaluation of efficiency and quality of care in pediatric hospitalist systems. For the past several years, he has been spending the majority of his time studying the safety of hospital care.  He helped design and conduct some of the first studies to determine rates of medication errors in pediatrics, and strategies to prevent them. He has conducted studies of complications and errors in the care of children with bronchiolitis; hand-off errors; and the role of computerized order entry systems in reducing errors in pediatric settings. Dr. Landrigan is currently studying the relationship between provider sleep deprivation and patient safety. He was a founding member of the Harvard Work Hours, Health, and Safety Group, and lead author of a study (New England Journal of Medicine, 2004) that found interns working traditional 24-30 hour shifts made 36% more serious medical errors, and five times as many serious diagnostic errors, as interns whose scheduled work was limited to 16 consecutive hours.  He subsequently led a national cohort study (JAMA, 2006) in which interns' compliance with the ACGME duty hour standards was found to be extremely poor, suggesting the need for further efforts to reduce sleep deprivation and fatigue-related errors.  Dr. Landrigan has been the principal investigator of two grants from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to conduct further research in this area, as well as the PI on several foundation grants regarding pediatric healthcare quality and patient safety.   He is the chair of the Pediatric Research in Inpatient Settings (PRIS) Research Network, which is beginning to study quality and variation in the care of hospitalized children, with the goal of developing and disseminating improvements. He has lectured extensively on the topics of pediatric hospital medicine, resident sleep deprivation, patient safety, and patient care handoffs, and has been active in efforts to develop policies that promote improved care quality and safer work schedules.

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