Do medical errors creep up at hospitals when interns arrive? Yes, but the ‘July effect’ is minimal.

For Dr. Jeremy Faust, July 1 is like New Year’s Day. That’s when thousands of new medical school graduates enter teaching hospitals across the country and provide care to patients as doctors for the first time.

“Everything is new and full of possibilities,” said Faust, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

With that excitement also comes a seemingly perennial debate around a phenomenon called the “July effect”–the idea that the inexperience of first-year residents, commonly called interns, might lead to a decrease in patient safety or increase in medical errors.

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