A Guide to Assist Health Departments and Healthcare Facilities with Conducting a Patient Notification Following Identification of an Infection Control Lapse or Disease Transmission

This article discusses the importance for healthcare organizations to understand the patient’s perspective after they received disclosure following an adverse medical event, because it could help them develop more effective communication methods. Researchers found that patients preferred it when healthcare systems disclosed adverse events to them. They also found that these systems should implement policies that promote disclosure between patients and physicians.

It’s part of health care providers’ professional culture to put their patients’ needs above their own. Before the COVID-19 crisis, health care providers had been experiencing a crisis of burnout which is now exacerbated by new challenges brought by the virus. This article provides several core principles as a way to move forward given the culture and challenges faced by health care providers.

By: Jo A. Shapiro, MD

Improving how health care providers respond to medical injury requires an understanding of patients’ experiences. Although many injured patients strongly desire to be heard, research rarely involves them. Institutional review boards worry about harming participants by asking them to revisit traumatic events, and hospital staff worry about provoking lawsuits. Institutions’ reluctance to approve this type of research has slowed progress toward responses to injuries that are better able to meet patients’ needs. In 2015-2016, we were able to surmount these challenges and interview 92 injured patients and families in the USA and New Zealand. This article explores whether the ethical and medico-legal concerns are, in fact, well-founded. Consistent with research about trauma-research-related distress, our participants’ accounts indicate that the pervasive fears about retraumatization are unfounded. Our experience also suggests that because being heard is an important (but often unmet) need for injured patients, talking provides psychological benefits and may decrease rather than increase the impetus to sue. Our article makes recommendations to institutional review boards and researchers. The benefits to responsibly conducted research with injured patients outweigh the risks to participants and institutions.

Health care providers working on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic are threatened not only by exposure to the virus but also by pervasive and detrimental  effects on their mental health. Immediate actions need to be taken for a national strategy to safeguard the health and well-being of our clinicians. The article outlines 5 high-priority actions to protect the well-being of clinicians during and after COVID-19 crisis.

Written by: Victor J. Dzau, M.D., Darrell Kirch, M.D., and Thomas Nasca, M.D.

Communication breakdowns in cancer care are unfortunately common and represent a failure in patient-centered care. While multiple studies have elicited patients’ perspectives on these breakdowns, little is known about cancer care providers’ attitudes regarding the causes and potential solutions. The purpose of this article is to examine providers’ (1) perceptions of the nature and causes of communication breakdowns with patients in cancer care and (2) suggestions for managing and preventing breakdowns.

This is a tip sheet for healthcare leaders about how to create an environment for CRP to succeed.

Zerillo, Tardiff, Flood, Sokol-Hesner, and Weiss retrospectively coded 148 corrective actions from 67 safety events brought to a tertiary care academic medical center’s multidisciplinary hospital-level safety event review meeting from 2020 to 2021. They coded by category and strength, using the US Department of Veterans Affairs/Institute for Healthcare Improvement Action Hierarchy Tool. They found an inverse relationship between intervention strength and completion; the strongest interventions had the lowest rate of completion. Also, the majority of corrective actions were categorized as weak.

This article highlights the importance of developing systems for tracking the completion of corrective actions. Without tracking data on completion, organizations cannot know how well they are mitigating the risks to safety that their analyses have identified. By integrating action strength and completion status into corrective action follow-up, healthcare organizations may more effectively identify and address those barriers to completing the strongest interventions that ultimately achieve high reliability.

Dr. Jo Shapiro of Brigham and Women’s Hospital is interviewed about disclosure, peer support, and resilience following medical error on Ireland’s national public radio, RTÉ Radio 1 (July 9, 2017).

Serious Illness Care Program COVID-19 Response Toolkit by Ariadne Labs, first version was published on April 3, 2020.

Ariadne Labs, one of Collaborative for Accountability and Improvement’s partners in cultivating high-quality, patient-centered care, has developed the Serious Illness Care Program’s COVID-19 Response Toolkit to help clinicians with difficult conversations with high risk COVID-19 patients.

Table of Contents: 

1. COVID-19 Conversation Guide for Outpatient Care
2. Telehealth Communication Tips
3. Recommendation Aid
4. Care Planning Resources

Expectations for how radiologists should communicate with patients are in rapid evolution. Of all the communication challenges radiologists may encounter, disclosing harmful radiologic errors to patients looms as perhaps the most difficult. Calls are increasing for radiologists to communicate directly and transparently with patients after errors. This article explores the direct radiologist-to-patient disclosure of harmful radiologic errors. It further explores the profession’s aspirations toward enhanced patient care, professionalism, and visibility.

This article describes recommendations that extend existing guidelines for clinicians and institutions on communicating with patients about colleagues’ harmful errors.

Large-scale adverse events are individual events or a series of related events that injured or increased the risk that many patients would be injured because of health care management. There are ethical reasons why institutions may hesitate to disclose large-scale adverse events to patients. Practical, legal, and financial considerations, such as the difficulty in predicting the likelihood of harm and identifying the injured patients, may also lead well-meaning institutions to consider not disclosing large-scale adverse events. This article discusses two ethical frameworks often used in determining whether to disclose large-scale adverse events: utilitarian and duty-based. It also describes three examples of large-scale adverse events and discuss their distinguishing features.

This report from the Betsy Lehman Center details two sets of research findings and proposes a coordinated response through which Massachusetts’s providers, policymakers, and public can accelerate safety and quality improvement and lead the nation on this urgent health care challenge.

Dr. Shapiro talks about the importance of having disclosure coaching program and fundamental principles of disclosure coaching. For more videos related to Disclosure and Apology, view the video gallery.

Patient and family emotional harm after medical errors may be profound. At an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) conference to establish a research agenda on this topic, the authors used visual images as a gateway to personal reflections among diverse stakeholders. Themes identified included chaos and turmoil, profound isolation, organizational denial, moral injury and betrayal, negative effects on families and communities, importance of relational skills, and healing effects of human connection. The exercise invited storytelling, enabled psychological safety, and fostered further collaborative discussion. The authors discuss implications for quality/safety, educational innovation, and qualitative research.