Although patients and families expressed a strong desire to know what would be done to prevent errors in the future, 24 of the 30 participants said they didn’t get information about safety improvements, the study also found.
“I suspect that hospitals simply underestimated the importance of providing this information back to patients,” says Dr. Anupam Jena of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
“There is a strong incentive for hospitals to make changes to improve quality of care after an adverse event, not only to prevent future similar events from occurring but also because hospitals would look unfavorable if a second adverse outcome occurred and no steps were initially taken to prevent that second event,” Jena, who wasn’t involved in the study, says by email.
Being open after errors may also help avoid litigation, notes Dr. Gary Noskin, senior vice president and chief medical officer of Northwestern Memorial Hospital and a researcher at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.
“Traditionally, hospitals follow a ‘deny and defend’ strategy providing a paucity of information to patients,” Noskin, who wasn’t involved in the study, says by email.
At the end of the day, the study, while small, still highlights what may be a fairly universal need patients have after medical mistakes, says Dr. William Sage, a professor of law and medicine at the University of Texas at Austin who wasn’t involved in the study.
“The importance of individualized engagement and empathy is really the take-home lesson from the study,” Sage says by email.
Reference
- Moore J, Mismark M, Mello M, et al. Patients’ experiences with communication-and-resolution programs after medical injury. JAMA Intern Med. 2017 Oct 9. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2017.4002.
