"I'm Sorry" May Have No Impact on Medical Malpractice Lawsuits
The new popular wisdom that gained currency last year is that doctors who apologize for their mistakes are less likely to face a medical malpractice lawsuit than doctors who refuse to come clean. This supports what medical malpractice lawyers have long claimed: patients are often most angered by concealment of the malpractice and the concern that it will happen again to another patient.
KevinMD reports today an even more updated conventional wisdom, citing a study presented in the Journal of General Internal Medicine that says there is likely no correlation between a patient's intent to bring a medical malpractice lawsuit and whether the doctor apologized.
I question the methodology of the study which relied on videos of actors pretending to be doctors with people trying to put themselves in the shoes of malpractice victims. A controlled study like this really takes the emotion out of a case and ignores the powerful dynamics of a relationship between a doctor and a patient (and the abject suffering experienced by most medical malpractice plaintiffs). You can't manufacturer that in a "make believe" study and expect meaningful data that translates to the real world.
The results from the University of Michigan and the University of Illinois contradict this Journal of General Internal Medicine study. At Michigan, one of the first to experiment with full disclosure of malpractice, existing claims and lawsuits dropped to 83 in August 2007 from 262 in August 2001. The number of medical malpractice lawsuits against the University of Illinois has dropped by half in two years after it started its program.
I suspect that apologies do help, but in the end, it does not change the obvious: when you hurt someone - either in the operating room or when you bump into them on the street - apologizing is the right thing to do. This social contract we all signed should really trump the question of whether malpractice lawsuits increase or decrease.
