I was very sad and quite angry after watching a powerful video this weekend entitled “The Faces of Medical Error: From Tears to Transparency.” It’s the story of Michael Skolnik. His mother, Patty, gave me the video when I met her recently. Michael had what may have been unnecessary brain surgery in 2001 and died three years later.
The Skolniks worked on this video as part of an educational campaign on medical error, and they created an organization now named Citizens for Patient Safety. Here’s a trailer to the video:
You can also watch a Today Show segment that profiled the Skolniks from a few years ago:
While much of the message is about medical errors and malpractice, the Skolniks also promote a message of the “critical need for shared decision-making.” In fact, I met Patty at a shared decision-making conference.
If you haven’t heard Michael Skolnik’s story, you should. And if you’re like me, you’ll need a tissue box close by for the sadness, and something else to help with the ensuing anger.
Thanks to Patty Skolnik for sharing the story and the video with me.
Dr. Kent Bottles is in the midst of a very thoughtful multi-part blog post under the heading, “The Difficult Science Behind Becoming a Savvy Healthcare Consumer.”
Part I examined “the limitations of science in helping us make wise choices and decisions about our health.”
Part II explores “how we all have to change if we are to live wisely in a time of rapid transformation of the American healthcare system that everyone agrees needs to decrease per-capita cost and increase quality.”
Both parts so far have addressed important issues about news media coverage of healthcare. Read more »
Over the long weekend I caught up on some reading. One article* stands out. It’s on informed consent, and the stunning disconnect between physicians’ and patients’ understanding of a procedure’s value.
The study, published in the Sept 7th Annals of Internal Medicine, used survey methods to evaluate 153 cardiology patients’ understanding of the potential benefit of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI or angioplasty). The investigators, at Baystate Medical Center in Massachusetts, compared patients’ responses to those of cardiologists who obtained consent and who performed the procedure. As outlined in the article’s introduction, PCI reduces heart attacks in patients with acute coronary syndrome — a more unstable situation than is chronic stable angina, in which case PCI relieves pain and improves quality of life but has no benefit in terms of recurrent myocardial infarction (MI) or survival.
The main result was that, after discussing the procedure with a cardiologist and signing the form, 88 percent of the patients, who almost all had chronic stable angina, believed that PCI would reduce their personal risk for having a heart attack. Only 17 percent of the cardiologists, who completed surveys about these particular patients and the potential benefit of PCI for patients facing similar scenarios, indicated that PCI would reduce the likelihood of MI.
This striking difference in patients’ and doctors’ perceptions is all the more significant because 96 percent of the patients “felt that they knew why they might undergo PCI, and more than half stated that they were actively involved in the decision-making.” Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Medical Lessons*
According to the Annals of Internal Medicine, doctors make the wrong medical decisions surprisingly often.
Using a “mystery patient” technique –- in which actors pretended to be patients –- researchers found that doctors made errors in complicated cases in 60 percent to 90 percent of cases. Sixty to ninety percent. In uncomplicated cases, they made errors in nearly 30 percent of cases.
As one study participant put it, “I was shocked.”
The study took place over three years, and included more than 100 doctors in six Chicago-area hospitals. The doctors had agreed to participate in a study on medical decision making, but had no idea that they might see a patient who was actually an actor. The actors recorded their conversations with the doctors. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at See First Blog*
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