Doctors More Likely to Tell Patients About Obvious Errors

Consider two medical scenarios. In one, a child receives an overdose of insulin and is admitted to the intensive care unit. In the other, a doctor overlooks a lab test, which leads to a child being hospitalized for a serious infection. The insulin overdose would be more apparent to the child’s family, while the overlooked lab test might not be so obvious. That may partly explain why 75% of pediatricians said they’d definitely report the insulin overdose to the child’s family, but only 33% said they’d definitely report the overlooked lab test. (It’s also worth noting that 89% rated the insulin overdose as a “serious error,” compared with 68% for the overlooked test.) Those findings, published today in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, come from a survey of about 200 pediatricians conducted (confusingly... [read full story]