"It may be that physicians find it more important or meaningful to talk to patients about mistakes and may not see as much value in communicating the same mistakes to a reporting system," says Dr. Lauris Kaldjian, associate professor of internal medicine and director of the UI Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine's Program in Biomedical Ethics and Medical Humanities.
Of the 338 physicians surveyed by Kaldjian and his colleagues across the United States, 73 percent said they would report to their institution a hypothetical error resulting in minor harm, and 92 percent said they would report a hypothetical error resulting in major harm.
In actuality few physicians (18 percent) reported a minor error and only 4 percent reported a major error to their hospital, Kaldjian writes in the January issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.
Only 55 percent of the respondents knew how to report errors, and only 39 percent knew what kinds of errors to report, he added.
