Too often in healthcare, professionals use vernacular to talk about patient outcomes that lacks humanity and softens the unpleasant truth that real people, their lives and their health are what is at stake. This euphemistic-speak may be accurate, but it doesn't do patients any favors. It tends to gloss over an uncomfortable truth: Outcomes, numbers, aggregates and data are all proxy words for real people who face real consequences when their care goes awry. Melissa Clarkson, a writer who investigates medical errors, experienced this at the Kansas Healthcare Collaborative 2015 Summit on Quality in Wichita on Oct. 16, when she heard use of the term "acceptable preventable harm."
"During the presentation on the Kansas Hospital Engagement Network I learned something disturbing: Many hospitals throughout the country agreed to a goal of reducing preventable patient harm by 40 percent by the end of 2014, as compared with 2010 levels," Ms. Clarkson wrote in a post on her blog, Disclose Medical Errors. "This goal was set by a program called Partnership for Patients from CMS."
"Let me state that again," she wrote. "[T]he GOAL — the target that hospitals are striving for as they serve the community — is to reduce preventable patient harm by 40 percent. I was not aware that harm comes as a mix of acceptable harm and unacceptable harm and the concern is getting rid of the unacceptable portion."
Following her father's death due to a serious medical error in 2012, Ms. Clarkson investigates and writes about the "wall of silence" she and her family ran into when they sought answers about where her father's care went wrong. She writes that experiencing harm from a medical error is horrible, and having providers then refuse to acknowledge the error only compounds the pain and grief.
In an effort to combat speech like "acceptable preventable harm", Ms. Clarkson designed four images that satirize and draw attention to the serious problem of a concept like acceptable preventable harm. The welcome sign:
The community newsletter update:
The harm tally board:
And The patient and family conversation script:
