If you watch House, M.D., you probably get the impression that most medical errors result from doctors or other medical professionals simply not being brilliant enough to put the puzzle pieces together.
However, an astonishing amount of medical malpractice is caused by simple attentional errors committed by medical professionals – doctors or nurses missing or forgetting a simple step in a process because they’re tired, distracted and, well, human.
I’ve blogged before about Dr. Atul Gawande’s Checklist Manifesto and efforts by the World Health Organization and Britain’s National Health Service to implement checklist protocols for surgeries and other procedures. Unfortunately, this effort is not making as much headway in the United States.
Now, from the Archives of Internal Medicine, comes another article highlighting how the use of checklists could help reduce medical malpractice.
The article, entitled “Association of Interruptions With Increased Risk And Severity of Medication Administration Errors,” shows that each time a nurse is interrupted in the course of administering a medication it increases his chance of making an error. The more times a nurse is distracted or interrupted in administering the medicine, the greater the likelihood of error.
Only about 20 percent of the time are medications correctly administered, although most of the time the errors cause no harm. In approximately two percent of the observed medication administrations, however, nurses committed critical errors.
What’s the solution for distracted nurses? It’s not better education or more advanced degrees, more professionalization. It’s more checklists!