Standards require hospitals to report errors to patients

Hospitals will lose accreditation if they don't tell patients when they are victims of medical errors, say new standards by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations.

By Damon Adams, AMNews staff. July 23, 2001.

The Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Lexington, Ky., doesn't try to cover up when a patient is given the wrong medication or a doctor errs during surgery.

The center freely admits the mistakes, then advises patients to get an attorney and helps them fill in claim forms.

"We take full responsibility and we apologize and we tell them that they are due compensation," said Chief of Staff Steve Kraman, MD, whose hospital has been disclosing errors to patients voluntarily since 1987. "We don't hide anything."

Hospitals across the country now must embrace a disclosure practice similar to one used at the Lexington VA.

Under new standards effective July 1, hospitals are required to tell patients when they are harmed by medical errors. The new standards for hospitals were introduced by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, which accredits about 5,000 hospitals.

The standards call for hospitals to launch efforts to prevent errors and to create discussion between hospital leadership and the rest of the hospital staff. Open talks about patient safety should encourage reporting of errors and involve staff in designing systems to prevent errors, Joint Commission officials said. If a hospital makes a medical mistake but fails to notify the patient, the hospital faces losing its accreditation.

And Joint Commission leaders want doctors to be the ones to do the notifying. "I really expect the responsible physicians to be out on the lines talking to the patients, not somebody from administration," said Dennis O'Leary, MD, commission president. [...]