The Nov. 24 issue of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine included an article by Dr. David C. Ring, a surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital, that might have made defense counsel cringe. In the article, Ring vividly describes how a series of personal and systemic mistakes led him to operate on the wrong arm of a 65-year-old woman. Through this disclosure, Ring hoped that others would learn from and avoid his traumatic mistake.
Although few physicians and hospitals are likely to adopt a program of publishing adverse events for public dissection, Ring’s story sheds light on the increasing recognition that hiding, denying and blindly defending claims of medical error are likely to encourage repetitive (and avoidable) errors in the long run and increase legal costs and payouts in the short run.
