Mr. Levy recalled the moment a former patient at BIDMC woke up from surgery only to find the physician had operated on the wrong leg. The physician reported the error, and the hospital offered a “thorough apology” to the patient.
But Mr. Levy said a hospital trustee later asked Mr. Levy what he intended to do to punish the physician.
“I replied: ‘Nothing. He already feels terrible about this mistake. Further punishment does not act as a deterrent in these kind of inadvertent errors,'” wrote Mr. Levy. “A senior physician added that if we want to establish an environment that promotes disclosure of errors and near misses, the fastest way to drive reporting underground is to punish someone who has made a mistake.”
The trustee somewhat agreed with Mr. Levy but said that, in his field, anyone who violated the rules or procedures — even by accident — would certainly face punishment.
“His field? Investment banking,” wrote Mr. Levy. “I laughed, thinking of how rarely people in that field seem to get punished when they break the rules.”
In conclusion, Mr. Levy said people in the medical field feel great distress when they harm patients, and punishment should be reserved for clear cases of negligence. “Other errors should be used to reinforce a learning environment in which we are hard on the problems rather than hard on the people,” he wrote.
More Articles on Hospitals and Medical Errors:
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