Everyone that calls our office was injured – to varying degrees – through some sort of medical care. They want to know whether their case is even viable (few are) and to explore their options. A substantial amount of potential clients speak with us about wanting to “make sure this doesn’t happen to anyone else.” Sometimes the decision to call us will be informed by conversations with folks who had a similarly bad outcome, or by what appears poorly managed offices or communication networks. When a client’s injury is due to a “systems error,” we pursue the claim against the hospital system, or health care entity. When the lawsuit is all done, do systems errors get fixed?
While we can only sue for money damages, we hope and expect that the financial impact will influence some change for the better. On the one hand, we have evidence that they do get fixed, for example via the Leapfrog Group hospital grades. You can see that some hospitals with a high rate of bad outcomes improved their practices. Medical malpractice lawyers around for long enough will recall which hospitals are no longer facing claims seemingly all the time.
A recent piece identified a concern among certain practitioners: that a systems error implicates all providers, no one is responsible. The author relayed observations from years of attending Morbidity & Mortality conferences. These M&M conferences are regular conferences held by hospitals and large clinics, especially if affiliated with a medical school, where adverse outcomes of patients are discussed as part of a quality improvement program. The author noted that in his observation, M&M conferences have morphed into focusing on all of the systems errors, while focusing less on individual mistakes. He argues that shifting the focus to systems “transfer[s] responsibility for improvement from that which we have complete control – ourselves, to that which is ossified and intractable.” He continues that blaming the system shifts the focus from “the primary work of being a physician as improving oneself…and instead transform into a factory of outrage towards others…”
Individual choices and actions remain at the root of most of our medical malpractice lawsuits. But with growing hospital systems and growing bureaucracies the fall out for providers, by way of burnout, and patients, by way of growing distance from providers, continues.
