For physicians a god like perspective is brought forth by society. Brain Goldman explains this in his video “Doctors make mistakes. Can we talk about that?’ Goldman puts very simply that if a baseball player clears the ball 3 out of 10 times its good, and if he can clear it 4 out of 10 times he’s amazing, but in the medical world what would truly want are doctors or surgeons only to do things right 4 out of 10 times. The answer is no! When it comes to are health or even the health of our loved ones we want absolute perfection. As a society I believe we are to blame for the needs of doctors to cover up misdiagnosis, and take firm belief that medical inaccuracies could be lessened if doctors were able to admit mistakes freely without fear of what the outcome could be.
American golfer Tom Watson captured the world's attention. If he had won at age 59 he would have been the oldest winner of the golfing championship. He captured my attention after he narrowly lost. Watson could have blamed his caddy, his clubs, or loud fans for his defeat. Instead he said plainly, "I put myself in a position to win but I did not get it done." He admitted that the errors leading to his defeat were his alone. If only more physicians had that same sense of responsibility about owning up to medical errors. It's easy, for example, to shrug off hospital infections. A decade ago, the Institute of Medicine published "To Err Is Human," a ground-breaking report that focused on the epidemic of medical errors in the U.S. Some of the nation's most respected physicians wrote it, and many doctors endorsed it. The report recommended changing hospital and physician practices to reduce errors. Those recommendations included publicly disclosing errors and safety concerns. Since then, billions have been spent studying the problem, but not much has Tens of thousands of people continue to die each year because of errors. It's difficult or impossible to determine who or what was responsible for a medical mistake or hospital-acquired infection. But often we know that an error was the culprit, not the disease or the patient. Administrators worry that if they acknowledge errors, doctors and staff will be afraid to report them. But is that fair to patients who might have been harmed? They deserve to know what happened. The patients and families deserve an apology from staff who take responsibility for the error. Until our health-care system gets its act together, patients and their families will have to be constructively assertive to get to the bottom of any mishaps In an ideal world, the only factors that would go into a physician's decisions would be his or her years of clinical training and an assessment of what's best for the patient. Unfortunately, healthcare isn't that simple. A
