Emotional harm from disrespect: the neglected preventable harm (June 2015)

Summary

Consider these actual patient experiences:

• A patient is admitted to the hospital for a bowel obstruction from a known malignancy. She calls her cancer specialist about this complication, but he is unavailable. A covering provider reading from her file says ‘your cancer is untreatable’. This is the first time she has heard this.
• A patient dies in the hospital and the next day the funeral home collects a body from the hospital morgue. After embalming the body, the funeral home is notified by the hospital that they were given the wrong body. Because of this error, it may not be possible to process the correct body in time for the wake the following day.

Despite being simultaneously dreadful and familiar to healthcare professionals, cases like these are not systematically identified or addressed in hospital quality improvement programmes. As a result, we have no good way of preventing them and patients inevitably continue to suffer from these unnecessary emotional harms. The authors of this paper, published in BMJ Quality & Safety, argue these cases are examples of preventable harm that are deserving of formal capture, classification and action by the healthcare system.