"Guilty, Afraid and Alone - Struggling with Medical Error"
« Back to From the Desk of Bruce J. Klores, Esquire
This is the unlikely title of an article appearing not in a lawyers' journal, but in the New England Journal of Medicine October 25, 2007 issue. The article, written by Tom Delbanco, M.D. and Sigall K. Bell, M.D., both from Harvard, discusses the terrible personal ramifications of medical errors on the general population. It is very refreshing to hear members of the medical community talk about the effect of errors on their patients as opposed to the traditional defensive terms the healthcare community uses in the discussion of medical malpractice.
Drs. Delbanco and Bell, after studying medical errors, have identified three critical themes that victims experience.
- Guilt: Family members often berate themselves and feel guilty about not keeping a close enough watch when a relative has been a victim of medical malpractice. Family members feel "if only I had been there."
- Fear: Patients and their families also become fearful if they are the victims of malpractice . . . they fear retribution or future poor treatment by the same health care providers or their brethren who may have actually been the perpetrators of the bad care. Some patients, and this is something we see in our practice, fear that by confronting medical personnel they may receive worse care.
- Isolation: After the harm has been done, family members often feel isolated. Clients often tell us that after there has been a terrible result they are never able to find a physician or nurse to even explain to them what happened. Victims and their loved ones very often become marginalized in hospitals and in doctors' offices, and almost ignored. As the authors of this study found, this may be because doctors and nurses often shy away from telling patients and their families bad news. Although doctors are good at giving good news, admitting to an error is not something they are trained to, or encouraged to do.
These authors nobly conclude that "building bridges to injured patients necessitates including them and other patients in the development of solutions."
We couldn't agree more.
November 22, 2007
