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IN THIS EDITION:
- Sorry Works! live on the Internet - tonight!
- Troubling quote
- Great Progress in Tennessee
- Beach Head in Pennsylvania?
Sorry Works live on the Internet - tonight!
You can listen to Sorry Works! live on the Internet tonight during a live half-hour radio show broadcase by WLIE 540AM Talk Radio from Long Island, New York. Sorry Works! spokesperson Doug Wojcieszak will be interviewed from 8pm to 8:30pm Eastern Time this evening. Ilene Corina, President of PULSE and Sorry Works! board member, invited Wojcieszak on the show and will be handling the interview. Here's the link for tuning in on your computer. Should be a great interview - please tune in.
Troubling Quote
What follows will be troubling for some people, perhaps many people. In fact, some folks might become very angry about this passage. We want to be upfront with you, our readers. We're trying to try to change the culture of medine for the better, and every so often debate and discussion has to be ingnited and some folks need to become uncomfortable to make culture changes. This passage certainly fills the bill. We appreciate your feedback at doug@sorryworks.net or call 618-559-8168. Thank you!
HPSO Risk Advisor recently ran a nice article on The Sorry Works! Coalition, which we appreciate greatly. However, HPSO Risk Advisor's article closed with a troubling quote:
"Some healthcare providers and their attorneys do not promote apologizing to patients for clinical errors. For this reason, HPSO can neither support nor reject the argument for apologizing presented here."
What follows is not meant to criticize HPSO directly, because their quote is merely a reflection of reality - and sad a reality it is. Many healthcare, legal, and insurance professionals agree with this qoute for all the wrong reasons. The simple fact is there are no legal, ethical, or economic reasons not to apologize, disclosure, and compensate legitimately injured patients and families. Covering up is not OK.
The HPSO quote is an outdated cultural relic. It's wrong. Dare we say it's every bit as wrong and antiquated as the following quote from 40 years ago:
Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."
When Gov. George Wallace uttered these infamous words he showed himself to be a dinosaur; however, there many people in the South and across the country at the time who agreed with him. There was great debate on the issue. Today, there is no debate. Any politician who uttered such foolishness would be driven from office immediately, and no respectable news organization would hesitate to condemn such a quote.
Jim Crow enslaved millions; medical errors kill and injure millions. The culture of the South has been reformed; the culture of medicine needs to be reformed.
Here's hoping that soon no doctor, healthcare professional, attorney, or risk manager would dare say it's OK not to apologize. And here's also hoping that news organizations that cover medicine and healthcare will stand up for what's right without hesitation.
In closing, the cultural problems in the medical field are not the same as the cultural problems that faced the south during the Jim Crow era. However, the stakes are every bit as high. Medicine will not correct its enormous patient safety problem until honesty is the standard, and cover-up and deception are no more. Furthermore, we can learn much from the civil rights champions. Chiefly, we're not going to change the culture of medicine by nibbling around the edges. Martin Luther King Jr. didn't change the culture of the South by laying back and playing nice - he challenged conventional wisdom and made a lot of people uncomfortable. So will we. Hopefully we can experience the same successes as Dr. King and his followers.
Great progress in Tennessee
Last week Sorry Works! spokesperson Doug Wojcieszak visited the Tennessee General Assembly as a guest of House Majority Leader Rob Briley. Wojcieszak testified before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, but also had a private meeting with lobbyists representing every major medical, hospital, and insurance organization in Tennessee. The med-mal battle has been brewing in the Volunteer State for 5+ years, and people from all sides (docs, lawyers, insurers) are tired of the fight. They are looking for a solution that everyone can live with, and Sorry Works! resonated with them.
We believe we have made many new friends in Tennessee, and look forward to future visits. Stay tuned for updates, and if you want to have Sorry Works! visit you call 618-559-8169 or write doug@sorryworks.net.
Beach Head in Pennsylvania?
Pennsylvania is another state that has been struggling mightly with the med-mal issue for many years. We have several members from the Keystone State, but have not received media coverage or offers to speak - until last week.
Below is a nice column on Sorry Works! that appeared in the Allentown Morning Call. We encourage our readers to share this column and newsletter with their colleagues and friends in Pennslyvania...perhaps we can begin to turn heads and change the debate for the better like we have done elsewhere.
April 20, 2006
From The Morning Call
Sorry Works injects decency into malpractice debate
Margie Peterson
One of the sad things about the medical malpractice crisis is that it has stifled the instinct toward decency.
From the time we can talk, people are taught that when we do something that hurts someone we should apologize.
But for years doctors, on advice from lawyers and insurers, were too often discouraged from apologizing when they made a medical error for fear it could be used as an admission of guilt if they were sued.
That's bad advice, according to Doug Wojcieszak, spokesman for Sorry Works, an Illinois-based coalition that encourages the medical community to adopt full-disclosure and apology policies.
An apology and an explanation would have gone a long way when Wojcieszak's brother died after a series of medical mistakes, he told me in a phone interview. Instead, when his father approached the hospital staff for an explanation and some sense of how the doctors planned to make sure it didn't happen to others, the staff told him their lawyers instructed them not to talk. Wojcieszak said his family sued and eventually recovered a settlement.
A better way can be found in the University of Michigan Health System, which dramatically cut the number of pending lawsuits against its hospitals after adopting a full-disclosure policy in 2002. It also reduced the costs of defending against suits from an average of $65,000 per case to $35,000 per case and cut the time it took to resolve cases from three years to about a year.
Under the policy, a hospital investigates suspected errors, and sits down with the patient and the patient's lawyer to review what happened. If the staff was found to have erred, they apologize and offer a settlement. If the treatment was shown to have been justified, the staff meets with the patient to explain why.
Should the patient decide to sue anyway, the hospital defends against the litigation. It's just as important that hospitals stand up for doctors and don't cave in and settle unwarranted lawsuits, Wojcieszak said.
A survey of trial lawyers in Michigan found that more are taking a pass on marginal medical malpractice cases because of the Health System's reputation for fairness, he said. "Because if University of Michigan is saying, 'We didn't make a mistake,' they probably didn't," he said.
Such hospitals are catching up to Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals, which pioneered full-disclosure policies in the 1980s, said Dr. Jim Bagian, chief of patient safety for the VA. "Most of the time people sue, they don't sue to collect damages," Bagian said. "They sue because they're mad. They're mad about how they were treated after the injury. People want you to admit there was a problem and (want to know) what are you going to do to make sure that it doesn't happen to someone else."
That last part is especially important, said health care consumer advocate Charles Inlander of Fogelsville, who is on the board of Sorry Works.
"This is really about making sure when errors occur, they're fixed and they're acknowledged," Inlander said.
On that he gets no argument from Dr. Ray Singer, a local thoracic surgeon and president of the Pennsylvania Association for Thoracic Surgery.
Pennsylvania already has a law that requires hospitals to notify patients within seven days if they made a serious error in their care, Singer noted. But patients don't generally sue doctors they like and those who have been upfront with them, he said. "The fact that you've been so open and honest has probably decreased your risk of being sued in the first place," Singer said.
By appealing to all sides' better instincts, the Sorry Works approach undercuts the rhetoric about blood-sucking lawyers and quack doctors that usually accompanies the medical malpractice debate.
margaret.peterson@mcall.com
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