INTRODUCTION
The first thing that comes to our mind when we hear about medical error is suspicion, fear, and doubt about the physician’s expertise. Understanding the sensitivity and existence of a person-centric blame culture and fear of litigation and punishment forced medical professionals to avoid reporting and addressing errors that create barriers to learning and improving the system; eventually unsafe practices will continue to be ignored, leading to patient safety at risk. According to a WHO report, worldwide, owing to medical errors, over 3 million lose their lives annually, and approximately 1 in 10 are victims.
Definition
Medical errors are described as unintentional failures to achieve outcomes despite having a well-planned structure.
Types:
Ø Diagnostic errors: Timely and precise diagnosis is the key to starting appropriate treatment, which leads to fruitful outcomes. Delayed, missed, erroneous, and overdiagnosis compromised patient safety.
Ø Medication errors occurred while prescribing, transcribing, monitoring, administering, and dispensing.
Ø Hospital-acquired infection (HAI): failure to maintain hygiene results in HAI.
Ø Communication gap error: lack of collaboration between physician staff and patient.
Ø Surgical errors: include wrong section, procedure, and patient.
Ø Machine error: malfunction, technical glitch, etc.
Ø Misidentification of a patient: leading to completely wrong treatment.
Takeaway:
Learning from errors via reporting incidents, analysis, evaluation, and a non-punitive, blame-free culture is a systematic and essential component at both the individual and organizational levels to upskill and result in qualitative improvement in the healthcare domain that turns mistakes into educational learning opportunities. To enhance patient safety, a stratagem to open discussion must be included among the legal system, the physician’s team, and organizations in a tripartite manner. Acknowledge that errors are an inevitable part of being human.
Have you ever encountered a medical error, and what have you learned?
MBH/AB
