Patients’ views are not often included in records of diagnostic errors, but new data released today suggest that patient and family narratives may contain key information that should formally be included in the system.
To learn more about how patient experience and patient-physician interactions might affect the risk for diagnostic error, Traber Davis Giardina, PhD, MSW, and colleagues analyzed reports submitted from January 2010 to February 2016 to the nonprofit Empowered Patient Coalition.
The coalition began collecting family experiences to learn more about safety events from the patient’s point of view. Patients, family members, and caregivers voluntarily submit data by responding to questions and adding their own text.
The researchers identified 184 unique patient stories of diagnostic error. Amid those narratives, problems in patient-physician interactions emerged as the major factor in the errors. “Our analysis identified 224 instances of behavioral and interpersonal factors that reflected unprofessional clinician behavior, including ignoring patients’ knowledge, disrespecting patients, failing to communicate, and manipulation or deception,” they write.
About two thirds (67.9%) of the narratives were contributed by female patients, and most of the reported diagnostic errors (79.9%) took place in a hospital. Although more than half of participants said that they had reported the incident either to the institution where it happened or to a governing body, only 9% said they were satisfied by the response, the authors write.
One woman wrote, “I was her first-born child, had worked in a major teaching hospital for years and thought I could manage her care, and make certain she was well taken care of…. I found I was unable to do so, since I was continually ignored…. I failed her.”
