Peter didn't tell the parents about the mistake, which threatened the infant's life. Albert Wu, MD, associate professor, Health Policy and Management, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, is the lead author of a study analyzing ethical arguments for and against disclosure of significant medical errors. The study was published in the current issue of Journal of General Internal Medicine . Dr. Wu says the right thing for a doctor to do is to tell patients about major medical mistakes. According to Dr. Wu, one study of doctors being trained at teaching hospitals showed that patients or their families were notified of mistakes less than a quarter of the time.
Physicians have an ethical obligation to tell patients about significant medical errors.
Dr. Wu said that disclosing a mistake is almost always the right thing to do, except in rare instances where disclosure would cause immediate harm to the patient. Such an instance might be that of a patient who was already depressed and would be incapacitated by the disclosure. Dr. Wu's study also recommends that when a physician becomes aware of a harmful error made by another physician, the first physician should encourage the second to disclose the error to the patient. Disclosing any kind of mistake to anyone is never easy. Certainly disclosure of a medical mistake can lead to litigation, but there are other disincentives as well.