One almost universal motivation for victims of medical malpractice is the desire to prevent the same thing from happening to someone else. Our clients want the hospital, doctor, or nurse to see that a mistake was made, and then take appropriate steps to prevent the same mistake from happening to someone else. Clients are generally shocked to learn that the hospital, doctor, or nurse generally refuses to acknowledge that an error was ever made, or attempts to keep the medical error a secret.

The “culture of opacity” endemic within the medical profession creates an environment where mistakes are unnecessarily repeated. Imagine how much safer hospitals would be if medical errors were instead openly discussed. Instead of learning from experience, hospitals could use their experiences to help other hospitals avoid similar mistakes.

Well, Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) has taken a step in that direction last year, when it began posting its internal publication addressing medical errors online, and accessible to the public, in the form of a blog.

BWH’s internal publication Safety Matters was first published in 2011. However, like other hospitals BWH’s publication was only accessible to hospital staff. However, beginning in mid 2015, BWH began publishing Safety Matters as a blog, which is updated once a month and details a medical error or near-miss that occurred at BWH. According to the hospital’s director of patient safety, Karen Fiumara, the only criteria for choosing which stories to share on the Safety Matters blog is their be a benefits to making the story public and that there is an opportunity through education to try to prevent a similar event from occurring.

The blog can be found here:

[Safety Matters](http://bwhsafetymatters.org)

To date it includes only two past issues, but it offers fascinating insight into how hospitals operate. Each blog post includes a description of what happened, what the author thinks went wrong, and how the hospital is working to make sure the same mistake can be avoided in the future. These available issues Safety Matters describe a medication error and a missed cancer diagnosis.

Given the medical establishment’s general reluctance to acknowledge that medical errors occur, the fact that BHS is describing medical errors in a public forum is a real step towards greater transparency. Indeed, learning from mistakes is an excellent way to avoid the same mistakes in the future. A public blog is an innovative and forward looking way for a hospital to share how a medical error occurred, and share best practices for preventing future similar medical errors.

Hopefully this kind of transparency will continue in the future, and potentially catch on at other hospitals and medical institutions. However, the last update to the BHS’s Safety First blog was in September of 2015.