Although medical quality experts advocate that medical errors be disclosed in order to ultimately improve patient safety, more than half the physicians in a recent study were not willing to admit an error to a patient when presented with scenarios that clearly put the physician at fault. The survey of 2,637 Canadian and American physicians by University of Washington researchers and published in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that 56% of the physicians would tell the patient there was an adverse event without using the word “error,” and only one-third would offer an apology. Although surgeons expressed more of an intent to admit to an error than medical physicians, the researchers found that they actually disclosed less. The study attributed physicians’ unwillingness to disclose mistakes to the desire for perfectionism ingrained in the “culture of medicine.”
Fear of being sued for medical malpractice had little bearing on rates of error disclosure, the researchers found in a companion study. Even though Canadian physicians are sued much less often than American physicians and have caps on pain and suffering, Canadian physicians were equally hesitant to report errors, reports The Seattle Times. “This code of silence, this conspiracy of silence does not work for reducing errors,” Eric Larson, one of the study’s authors, told the Times. “What we know now is it does nobody any good to bury a mistake or cover up a mistake; you can’t correct what led to the mistake unless you deal with it explicitly.”
