Revealing Medical Errors to Your Patients

Mohammed

Reference: Murphy, J. G& McEvoy, M.T.(2008)Revealing Medical Errors to Your Patients. Chest joarnal,133:1064-1065.retrived 05/22/08 from EBSKO database.

Summary

In Joseph G. Murphy and Marian T. McEvoy article "Revealing Medical Errors to Your Patients." The authors discuss how those medical errors can happen by professional physician. There are three common errors, over dose of anesthesia, which cause death, informing the patient what's happened to him by mistake, and mixing the name of patient with her husband in the patient's record. The patients must get all there ethical rights whether for personal autonomy and dignity or for the outcome of wrong treatment. Most of the studies show the patients were not informed about their medical errors. Also, the patients want to know full information even though cannot understand. On the other hand many states in the US recently did not accept the medical apology laws that protect physician against liability. It is clear to inform patients when the errors are harmful, but if it is near miss and they already fixed it, so, that unnecessary to be known. New studies show most of medical errors came from slight. Many physicians want to tell the patient every thing because recently anyone can get all information from medical internet websites. Recently, we can see decreasing in the number of errors or at least remaining it in the same level after the financial compensation. Patients and their families may be dismayed at the outset, in fact they accept the apology, and would like to know if the doctors learn about their mistakes.

Reaction

Medical errors are a significant threat to the lives of patients today. We have found a lot of medical errors come through negligence. We can't ignore newspapers which talked about some doctors who forgot some their stuff in the abdomen of the patient such as towels or even a clipper?? The social status created by the community which appears the doctors as over critic does not mean condoning the errors. Physician like ordinary employee all of them must be hold when they defaults. Somebody could argue that this may affect the work where the doctor may feel uncomfortable with the promise of self-confidence .We can understand that, but we must put some regulations to protect the patient's lives.Some of government like Saudi Arabia have some rules to keep those mistakes under control. One solution proposed is a comprehensive medical insurance, but for this discussion there is another place.