Greedy Trial Lawyer
When A Doctor Is Likely To Disclose Medical Errors
Category: Seeing Clearly Now
Parallel Universes posts on the subject of revealing medical errors to patients. You can read the statistics. Apparently, an error has to be both serious and obvious to assure it will be disclosed.
Doctors are less likely to reveal major medical mishaps if the error is not obvious to the patient, new research has found. A study of almost 2700 American and Canadian doctors has found that 65 per cent would definitely disclose a serious mistake made during treatment.But the medics varied widely in when and how they told patients an error had occurred. A doctor confronted with a obvious error was far more likely to impart the news to their patient than one faced with a less apparent mistake.
You can read the abstract of the study published in the current issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine here, and the results are:
64 percent of the doctors agreed that (medical) errors are a serious problem;50 percent disagreed that errors are usually caused by system failures
98 percent endorsed disclosing serious errors to patients;
78 percent supported disclosing minor errors;
74 percent thought disclosing a serious error would be very difficult;
58 percent had disclosed a serious error to a patient;
85 percent were satisfied with the disclosure
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