Imagine you’ve been admitted to the hospital for a necessary procedure stemming from a cancerous tumor. You place a call to your oncologist to discuss the complication you’re having but he isn’t available. Someone who is covering for the physician tries to step in and help but in doing so reads from your personal records that your cancer is not treatable. This is the first time you are hearing this news. This is a true story.
Unfortunately, instances like this occur every day in our health care system. People are harmed emotionally, not just medically. Emotional harms can be seen as harms to a patient’s dignity. These harms, while unintended, are often a result of not treating the patient as a person. But the disease can also be a culprit in a person feeling a loss of dignity, as well as the design of hospital rooms which don't always provide adequate privacy.
The definitions of dignity and respect as preventable harms currently do not exist in our health care system. Yet there is opportunity to establish those definitions, use them to identify cases of harm, and to analyze them in ways that could lead to concrete steps to prevent them. Our grantee, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, is taking on a difficult, yet much needed, approach to capture, categorize and assess these types of harms in order to understand their root causes and prevent them from happening. The medical center’s trail blazing work was recently published in the prestigious medical journal BMJ Quality & Safety. You can read the three-page paper here.
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Thank you for sharing.