This is a relatively new topic and somewhat controversial, due to the fact that there is a lot on the line when it comes to patient safety and the ramifications that come with it. Medical Error Best Practice was pioneered at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky (Patient Safety Program) and calls for the immediate reporting to risk management of an error in care.
According to the Veterans Health Administration handbook, “The Patient Safety Program’s goal is to prevent harm to patients. This is accomplished by taking steps in the way things are done so that the level of faith and trust in the VHA patient safety system is established and behaviors designed to prevent adverse events become a part of all employee behavior. NOTE: This is a never-ending process. In this way a “culture of safety” can be formed.”
The basic principle of this practice is for the physician who committed the error, to apologize to the patient, and when appropriate, compensation is offered.
In a recent article written by Business Insurance, Louise Kertesz writes that timely analysis of the error leads to improved care, according to experts involved. She also goes on to write,
“The best practice is not driven primarily by the various state mandates requiring disclosure of medical errors, industry experts said.
‘Public reporting is not the motivation behind this at all. We do it for two reasons: It’s the right thing to do and it makes good business sense,” said Jeffrey Driver, chief risk officer of Stanford University Medical Center and executive vp of the Stanford University Medical Indemnity and Trust in Stanford, California.”
Chief Risk Officer Richard Botthman of the University of Michigan Health System in Ann Arbor said the hospital system implemented its program of full disclosure and compensation for medical errors 10 years ago.
With the new system in place, the hospital found the approach resulted in “a decrease in new legal claims (including the number of new lawsuits per month), time to claim resolution and total liability costs” in 2007 compared with 1995 according to a 2010 study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
According to the US Department of Veterans Affairs website, VA’s National Center for Patient Safety (NCPS) was established in 1999 to develop and nurture a culture of safety throughout the Veterans Health Administration.
The VA has a dedicated website to patient safety with a variety of resources available to the public and health care professionals. The National Center for Patient Safety
