Safety Net

If health care providers use a clinical guideline when they evaluate a patient—and the patient has a bad outcome, are the providers legally free and clear? And what if they don’t follow the guidelines? It turns out to be an under-studied area of the law. So CRICO asked a leading defense attorney, Ellen Epstein Cohen, in Boston for some insights.

With widespread job burnout among clinicians, new studies look at ways to reduce the prevalence and the harm. CRICO interviews researchers and doctors who have left medicine, to share their insights and ideas.

Doctors are less accurate with difficult diagnoses, yet research shows that their level of confidence in in their conclusions remains high in those cases. The situation is ripe for poor patient outcomes and medical malpractice litigation.

Morbidity and mortality rounds are a time-honored method of learning from difficult hospital cases. Now that most care—and most lawsuits—happen in ambulatory settings, the Harvard teaching hospitals are trying M+Ms at their out-patient sites.

In light of a 2012 disclosure mandate, clinicians are advised to resist the urge to reach a conclusion or speculate when telling patients about care that went wrong.

Doctors-in-training often mistakenly assume they can’t be sued if they followed their superior’s care plan, but a Boston defense attorney sets them straight.

An online Medscape poll reveals which specialty has the most and least happy members, and CRICO interviews physicians to find out how they reduce stress and stay motivated.

(Part 2 of 2) The “Father of Patient Safety” reflects on the impact of the patient safety movement 10 years after the IOM report.... its successes…and its disappointments, from a national vantage point.

(Part 1 of 2) The “Father of Patient Safety” reflects on the impact of the patient safety movement 10 years after the IOM report.... its successes…and its disappointments, from a national vantage point.

Strong indicators that telling nurses when to call the doctor to the bedside reduce bad outcomes.

Even the best care in medicine can be undermined when responsibility for the patient is transferred from one provider to the next. Hand-offs—both within the hospital and upon discharge—are the subject of increasing attention by malpractice insurers and patient safety researchers.

We found that the surgeons did the best in the area of explaining the medical facts of the event. But they struggled in other areas: taking responsibility for the event, apologizing for the event, and explaining to the patients about how recurrences of the error would be prevented.