Medicine too complex to be error-free
I notice that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists is gearing up for its annual clinical meeting May 15 through May 19 in San Francisco.
The 2009 annual meeting was in Chicago, and I attended as many sessions as I could -- I don't want my ideas about what is going on in obstetrics to stop with my own birth experiences. (Sadly, I won't be able to attend the San Francisco meeting.)
I learned a lot last May, but one thing stayed with me in particular, Dr. Robert Wachter's keynote address.
Robert Wachter MD
Dr. Wachter, chief of the medical service at the University of California at San Franciso, among other titles, is one of the founders of the hospitalist movement, and an expert in patient safety.
He spoke about efforts to improve safety since 1999, when the Institute of Medicine released its landmark report, To Err Is Human, which revealed that as many as 98,000 people were dying from medical mistakes every year.
Dr. Wachter's message is important for the birth story because obstetricians are the doctors most often sued for malpractice. A 2003 ACOG survey showed that 76 percent of OB-GYNs have been sued at least once.
Many of them would say that if anything ever goes wrong with a birth, they are sued whether the mishap was their fault or not. Dr. Wachter agreed that "the blame game" is "not productive."
He said, "Medicine is too complex to be error free." Some other complex industries have better safety records, though, he said, often because they have developed "systems thinking," standardizing procedures and accepting that some mistakes are a natural part of the process.
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