profession
Fear of punitive response to hospital errors lingers
Posted July 3, 2012
Most health professionals remain reluctant to discuss problems or report mistakes freely, despite appeals to hospitals that they stop pointing fingers when things go wrong. A shame-and-blame culture means most hospital workers still believe institutions are more interested in punishing missteps than encouraging open communication.For more than a decade, patient safety leaders have urged medicine to shift from an approach that shames and blames individual doctors and nurses for medical errors to a "culture of safety" where open discussion and reporting about adverse events, mistakes, disruptive behavior and unsafe conditions are prized rather than punished.This less-punitive model of medical-error prevention, inspired by the aviation industry's safety record since the 1980s, is a key element of the Joint Commission requirements hospitals must follow to get paid by Medicare. And a growing body of evidence is showing that higher safety culture scores are correlated with better clinical outcomes and lower rates of hospital-acquired conditions.Yet data released in February by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality show that most physicians, nurses, pharmacists and other health professionals working in hospitals believe their organizations are still more interested in punishing missteps and enforcing hierarchy than in encouraging open communication and using adverse-event reports to learn what's gone wrong.
Copyright © 2012 American Medical Association. All rights reserved.
