When Things Go Awry: Making Sense of Medical Errors

Per the prompt for next week’s Grand Rounds, I’ve been thinking a lot about medical errors and what they do to the relationship between patients and healthcare providers.

Fortunately, I’ve never been involved in the type of medical errors that make the news, like wrong-side surgeries, items left in body cavities after surgery, lethal doses of the wrong medicine, etc. Thankfully, no one in my life has ever experienced anything of this magnitude either. But for every major crack in the system that makes the news, there are many tiny fissures that chip away at its integrity.

In my 28 years of patienthood, I’ve collected my fair share of mishaps and errors: The time I was forgotten about for 20 minutes after a barium swallow test, suspended in the air with my oxygen out of reach several feet away. The time that I was transported to radiology for someone else’s head CT scan, despite repeated protests that my lungs were the problem. The time I woke up during lung surgery (in the recovery unit I’d hoped that horrifying feeling had been a dream. It wasn’t), or the time a loved one was woken up and ordered to take pain medicine that wasn’t hers. I’ll leave delayed diagnoses and altogether wrong diagnoses for another day, because they are more nuanced, less obviously categorized, and especially in the case of delayed diagnoses, less split along lines of culpability.

(And of course there are the minor infringements and indignities: The blood draws that take 3 different techs and leave 8-10 bruises. The CT scans that aren’t where they are supposed to be for pick-up, or the mix-up with test results. Vials of blood dropped on the floor, cultures whose results get lost somewhere in translation, paperwork that is not filled out correctly, bills that belong to other patients that end up on my account…)

Though it relies so heavily on science, medicine is a profoundly human institution, never more so than in those moments when things go wrong. And like most human interactions when things go awry, the reasons usually include pure unintentional accident (who hasn’t pressed the wrong button, misplaced a slip of paper, etc), basic incompetence (there is a learning curve to everything), and what I think are definitely more damaging to the relationship, indifference and pride.

Personally, I am less interested in dissecting what can go wrong than focusing on what to do when it happens. In the macro sense, this could include improved safety protocols (like the checklist before surgeries) and other institutional safeguards. But I’m coming at this from the patient perspective, so I will leave those discussions to others.

No, what I am talking about are the more immediate reactions, how we treat each other when things don’t go as planned. Mistakes will happen but the mistakes themselves are not usually what bother me or stick with me, it’s the way they were handled.

(I recognize, of course, that it is because I have never experienced a major, life-threatening medical error that I can focus on this aspect of things.)

For example, in the wrong CT scan scenario I mentioned earlier, I received two very different responses. The person doing the scan became angry when I repeatedly told her I did not need a brain scan (as forcefully as someone in respiratory distress could), and became angrier when the same thing was told to her from someone higher up in authority. A vulnerable situation—not being able to breathe has a way of making you feel powerless—was made even more so by the fact that my voice was repeatedly ignored.

But moments later, the attending doctor apologized, told me he’d make sure the “patient has altered mental status” comment would be erased from my medical record, and checked in with me later to confirm with me the correction had been made and to apologize again. That’s what I needed—a simple apology and more than that, assurance that the mess had been cleaned up. In the exchange itself, what I needed was a few seconds of listening, an extra minute to confirm my patient ID, or basic recognition that someone who is visibly not breathing well might be onto something when she says it’s her lungs that need checking. I needed to be treated as a person, not a nuisance and not as someone who has absolutely no knowledge or insight into my own body.

If the mix-up had ended when I first got to the room (the transport orderly stared at my ID bracelet for a long time and somehow declared I was the right patient and that the number matched the brain scan patient’s) I would not have cared. After all, mistakes happen, especially in a busy ER. My ID would have been confirmed, I would have gone to get the imaging I needed for my own care, and the patient with the brain tumor would not be wandering around the hospital. It could have been cleared up in a couple of minutes.

But that’s the difference between accidents (reading the wrong number) and events that are the result of indifference or pride. Generally I try to laugh off some of these mishaps; after all, they make a good story and after all, everyone makes mistakes. However, what makes me angry or makes me resentful are the times when the errors are somehow shifted back to me. Whether it’s a doctor, nurse or lab tech doing that to a patient, a teacher doing that to a student, or a boss doing that to an employee (notice the trend here that skews towards issues of balance of power and authority?), it doesn’t make it right and it always damages the relationship.

It’s the same with smaller things like not getting my test results because my blood vials were dropped on the floor, or my name was entered in wrong, or the person who needed to submit form X did not do so. Just let me know and take steps to fix it and I’m on board with you; don’t get irritated with me that you now need to do more work, don’t act like I am an inconvenience to you when I am the one who needs to re-schedule work to come back in for the same tests I just had the day before because of your mistake.

Like every interaction, there are two sides and two avenues for conduct. The way I respond inevitably impacts how the situation resolves itself, too. I can accept the apology or not; I can be calm and reasonable or not; I can differentiate between an unintentional mistake and arrogance or indifference or not. These are distinctions I hope to receive when I make mistakes and errors that impact those around me (students, clients, etc).

Every profession, every interaction between people presents an opportunity for errors. Obviously the stakes are usually much greater when it comes to medical errors, but the basic rules apply nonetheless: Treat people with dignity and respect. Focus on fixing the problem appropriately and moving forward. Be forthright. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is simply say “I’m sorry.” Yet for (non life-threatening) errors, those two words can mean the difference between a blip on the proverbial radar screen and an event that damages trust and fosters resentment.