Medical Errors Upset Health-Care Providers and May Cause Them to Downplay Mistakes, Study Finds

People – even highly trained medical professionals – make mistakes. While easy to acknowledge, it seems this truth isn’t so easy for some doctors and nurses to admit, a new study finds, and it may be contributing to what one physician calls a “toxic culture of perfection.”

A study published recently in Critical Care Medicine used interviews with doctors and nurses in two French intensive care units (ICUs) to identify the psychological effects of a medical error on health-care professionals.

The authors found that ICU errors have a range of impacts on caregivers in the month following the error, including guilt (53.8 percent), shame (42.5 percent), loss of confidence (32.5 percent), anxiety (37.5 percent), and an inability to verbalize the error (22.5 percent). The trauma also affected staff relations, with 15 percent reporting anger toward the team.

“If the error affects the patient and his/her family, it will also have an impact on the caregivers involved, their colleagues, and even the entire service,” study author Dr. Alexandra Laurent of the Université de Franche-Comté said in an interview posted on MedicalResearch.com.

The good news about errors is that they can serve as a point of departure for avoiding similar mistakes in the future – but such a strategy implies that medical professionals actually own up to their wrongdoing.

Among the doctors and nurses interviewed in the study, 80 percent said errors remained fixed in their memories. For 72.5 percent, the error was associated with “an increase in vigilance and verifications in their professional practice,” including 43.5 percent who developed skills and knowledge in response to the error.

Others, however, employed less productive defense mechanisms to “fight against the emotional load inherent in the error.” Nearly one-third, for example, rejected responsibility for the error, while 60 percent minimized the error.

The authors conclude that taking into consideration the psychological repercussions of – and reactions to – an error is important because “they appear to determine the professional’s capacity to acknowledge and disclose his/her error and to learn from it.”

This sounds similar to what doctor and author Danielle Ofri told an audience at TEDMed 2014 in Washington, D.C. Dr. Ofri admits that while training to be a physician, she failed to report an error she made. Her message now to medical professionals in a similar position is simple: admit that you made a mistake in the first place.

“Tending to an emotional landscape may seem too squishy, but despite our best efforts, there is no way to improve without acknowledgement of our imperfections,” Dr. Ofri said in her TED talk, as quoted in MedCity News.

Medical professionals and hospitals aren’t the only ones that fail to report errors. Some patients may be hesitant to report instances of harm caused by medical mistakes. To discuss a potential medical error in confidence with an experienced attorney, please contact the medical malpractice lawyers at Morrow Kidman Tinker Macey-Cushman to schedule a free case review.