I went to a Scientia lecture by Dr. Vimla Patel this afternoon. The talk was titled: "Failure to Detect Medical Error: Debunking the myth of the Infallible Expert". Dr. Patel is a biomedical informaticist at UTHSC who studies medical errors.
While the talk was fascinating (an hour went by so fast!), certain points Dr. Patel made really captured my attention. While we accept mistakes as normal and human, when experts make such errors, we may not be as forgiving. Especially in this case, when the expert is a physician whose mistake may affect someone's health/body/life, mistakes are considered an anomaly never to be repeated.
She spoke about the different studies conducted to observe mistakes, detection and correction, and her approach to studying this was fascinating. She had a graph starting with on-paper experiments where residents/students are asked to evaluate a case, then "in vivo" studies where a team having a dialogue was observed, unaware that it was a simulated experiment. Then, of course, there were in situ studies where specific doctors were followed and recorded to detect their mistakes. She mentioned that they are developing virtual experiments to fill in the gaps between the different "realistic" experiments.
She also mentioned that mistakes may not be mistakes, something I took further as an advice on life than on this limited topic alone: there are always uncertainties and unknowns in a situation, and we may do the best we can, but the environment we were in may not have been complete.
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