According to a Consumer Report article published in February 2015, patients who said that they rarely received respect from the medical staff were ***two and a half times*** as likely to experience medical error—such as a hospital acquired infection, incorrect diagnosis, adverse drug reaction, or prescribing mistake—than were patients who thought that they were usually treated with respect. Consumer Reports article states:

Every day almost 2,000 people on average pick up an infection in the hospital and about 1,100 preventable drug errors occur. Overall, hospital medical errors are linked to 440,000 deaths annually. A growing number of health experts think that lack of respect is an ingrained part of medicine that contributes greatly to those errors. In the journal Academic Medicine, a group of Harvard Medical School doctors and researchers wrote, “Creating a culture of respect in health care is part of the larger challenge of creating a culture of safety.” The safest hospitals, the authors suggest, are those that “reveal certain common cultural characteristics: shared core values of transparency, accountability, and mutual respect.”

The article describes a link between respectful treatment in the hospital and preventable medical errors. In other words, if your health care providers treat you with respect, the odds improve that you will get the benefits health care has to offer without experiencing a medical error that may harm you. It should be common sense that when medical professionals treat their patients like human beings—instead of commodities—they make fewer errors.

Consumer Reports advises patients to remind medical professionals “that you are more than a diagnosis” when you a new physician or hospital where you may not know any of the providers. “Bring in pictures, maybe one showing you playing golf or tennis. Tell your nurse about your family. Add a personal detail when you describe your medical problems to a doctor.”

Our anecdotal experience representing individuals injured through the negligence of medical professionals supports this conclusion. In fact, one of the most frequent comments we hear from clients is that the healthcare practitioner who injured them was rude, condescending, or disrespectful.

This can happen in any health care situation: in the Emergency Room, while admitted to a hospital, or in a primary care clinic office. And it can happen with any level of provider: surgeons, other physicians, ARNPs and nurses all have the opportunity to choose to treat their patients with condescension, or with care and empathy.

Indeed, it seems intuitive that the more your health care providers care about you as a person, the more careful they will be in treating you. Medical professionals have fewer errors when they show their patients that they care by treating them with dignity and respect. Not only that, but as has been written on this blog previously, doctors who treat their patients better have happier patients who tend not to want to sue them later when a complication from treatment arises.

The legendary Pacific Lutheran University football coach Frosty Westering had a saying for aspiring coaches: “Players don’t care how much I know, until they know how much I care.” It appears that this excellent advice applies with equal force to the health care professionals entrusted with our lives.