One part of my job is talking with regular people about what they think about cases I either have already decided to take, or ones I am considering taking, and getting their opinions on various aspects of the claims. Often it is to see how they react to my client’s claim that a health care provider did something wrong – a failure to give a medication, a birth injury, a delay in diagnosing a serious condition, or something else.

I often have to suppress my reaction to some of the ways people bend over backward to give the doctor or nurse the benefit of the doubt, although it has gotten easier over time. Doctors and nurses don’t just make mistakes, they are “honest mistakes,” and they are always trying to help the patient when they do. So regular people tend to forgive many such errors.

As someone who never defends doctors, and only represents claimants against them, I have not spent a good deal of time considering what doctors and nurses think about expectations the public has on them. An interesting and recent TED talk discussed this point of view, and concluded that most doctors, instead of admitting mistakes, would rather hide them than report them and face repercussions.

The speaker, Dr. Danielle Ofri, calls this “culture of perfection” a barrier to safety improvement.

You can read a synopsis of the talk here:

[To reduce medical errors, doctor-author explains the need to undo toxic culture of perfection][1]

Interestingly, Dr. Ofri relates a time when she herself declined to report an error. She states that it was due to the “overriding fear of malpractice suits that punish doctors who admit errors.”

Unfortunately, if only Dr. Ofri and her colleagues had a better idea, not from their insurance carriers, but from malpractice attorneys such as us who live day to day in the trenches, how difficult bringing such claims is (read [here][2] for a previous post on the topic), or that patient victims are much less inclined to bring suits against doctors who admit their mistakes, maybe there would be less of a “culture of perfection.” Still, I’m not convinced this “overriding fear” is the sole reason for failing to report errors.

Regular folks in everyday life make mistakes, and most of the time there is some strong pull to not admit them. Certainly, most of that involves repercussions. But rarely in everyday life do those repercussions involve legal action. More often, it’s hard to admit I made a mistake because I see myself as someone who doesn’t make mistakes, and doing so creates some cognitive dissonance. Or, there may be non-legal repercussions – having someone angry at you, feeling embarrassed, or just feeling bad. This difficulty admitting mistakes sounds not only like how I feel, but it also sounds a lot like how my five year old reacts.

I’m not saying doctors are like five year olds, but then again, I am saying that this inability to face the mistakes we’ve made permeates our culture, from little kids to professional adults, like doctors and lawyers. And with respect to doctors, one crucial difference is the magnitude of harm that can be caused. It is for that reason I hope the health care industry continues to improve and eliminate tragic errors. Not for the doctors, but for the patients.

[1]: http://medcitynews.com/2014/09/trust-critical-reducing-medical-errors/ “To reduce medical errors, doctor-author explains the need to undo toxic culture of perfection”
[2]: https://cmglaw.com/Blog/2014/09/Defensive_medicine_slick_talking_pl “here”