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Second victims in health care: current perspectives

Medical errors are a serious public health problem and the third-leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer. Every day, the health care professionals (HCPs) practice their skill and knowledge within excessively complex situations and meet unexpected patient outcomes. These unexpected comp...

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Autores principales: Ozeke, Ozcan, Ozeke, Vildan, Coskun, Ozlem, Budakoglu, Isil Irem
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Dove 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6697646/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31496861
http://dx.doi.org/10.2147/AMEP.S185912
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author Ozeke, Ozcan
Ozeke, Vildan
Coskun, Ozlem
Budakoglu, Isil Irem
author_facet Ozeke, Ozcan
Ozeke, Vildan
Coskun, Ozlem
Budakoglu, Isil Irem
author_sort Ozeke, Ozcan
collection PubMed
description Medical errors are a serious public health problem and the third-leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer. Every day, the health care professionals (HCPs) practice their skill and knowledge within excessively complex situations and meet unexpected patient outcomes. These unexpected complications and unintentional errors will always be a part of the medical system due to the universal nature of human fallibility and technology. While not all errors are life-threatening, they can significantly compromise a patient’s quality of life. However, the victims of medical error reach far beyond the patient. The second victim (SV), which defined for the first time by Albert Wu in his description of the impact of errors on HCPs by both personally and professionally, is a medical emergency equivalent to post-traumatic stress disorder. When the errors occur, it causes a domino effect including the four groups: the patient and family (first victim), the HCP [SV], the hospital reputation (third victim), and patients who are harmed subsequently (fourth victims). The rights of our patients to safe, reliable, and patient-centered care are critical and most important as a primary and utmost aim of medicine. However, we also have to take care of our own (SVs), especially when we have good people who mean to do well and then find themselves in an emotionally complex situation. There is a need to articulate to the public, politicians, and media how system failure leads to medical error even in hand of well-educated and competent HCPs are given an increasing clinical workload. Furthermore, despite several leading institutions in western countries have developed formal support programs that allow HCPs to cope with their emotional distress by obtaining timely support in an emphatic, confidential, non-judgmental environment, we need to raise awareness of this phenomenon and appropriate institutional responses both to harmed patients and their families and HCPs.
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spelling pubmed-66976462019-09-06 Second victims in health care: current perspectives Ozeke, Ozcan Ozeke, Vildan Coskun, Ozlem Budakoglu, Isil Irem Adv Med Educ Pract Review Medical errors are a serious public health problem and the third-leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer. Every day, the health care professionals (HCPs) practice their skill and knowledge within excessively complex situations and meet unexpected patient outcomes. These unexpected complications and unintentional errors will always be a part of the medical system due to the universal nature of human fallibility and technology. While not all errors are life-threatening, they can significantly compromise a patient’s quality of life. However, the victims of medical error reach far beyond the patient. The second victim (SV), which defined for the first time by Albert Wu in his description of the impact of errors on HCPs by both personally and professionally, is a medical emergency equivalent to post-traumatic stress disorder. When the errors occur, it causes a domino effect including the four groups: the patient and family (first victim), the HCP [SV], the hospital reputation (third victim), and patients who are harmed subsequently (fourth victims). The rights of our patients to safe, reliable, and patient-centered care are critical and most important as a primary and utmost aim of medicine. However, we also have to take care of our own (SVs), especially when we have good people who mean to do well and then find themselves in an emotionally complex situation. There is a need to articulate to the public, politicians, and media how system failure leads to medical error even in hand of well-educated and competent HCPs are given an increasing clinical workload. Furthermore, despite several leading institutions in western countries have developed formal support programs that allow HCPs to cope with their emotional distress by obtaining timely support in an emphatic, confidential, non-judgmental environment, we need to raise awareness of this phenomenon and appropriate institutional responses both to harmed patients and their families and HCPs. Dove 2019-08-12 /pmc/articles/PMC6697646/ /pubmed/31496861 http://dx.doi.org/10.2147/AMEP.S185912 Text en © 2019 Ozeke et al. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ This work is published and licensed by Dove Medical Press Limited. The full terms of this license are available at https://www.dovepress.com/terms.php and incorporate the Creative Commons Attribution – Non Commercial (unported, v3.0) License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/). By accessing the work you hereby accept the Terms. Non-commercial uses of the work are permitted without any further permission from Dove Medical Press Limited, provided the work is properly attributed. For permission for commercial use of this work, please see paragraphs 4.2 and 5 of our Terms (https://www.dovepress.com/terms.php).
spellingShingle Review
Ozeke, Ozcan
Ozeke, Vildan
Coskun, Ozlem
Budakoglu, Isil Irem
Second victims in health care: current perspectives
title Second victims in health care: current perspectives
title_full Second victims in health care: current perspectives
title_fullStr Second victims in health care: current perspectives
title_full_unstemmed Second victims in health care: current perspectives
title_short Second victims in health care: current perspectives
title_sort second victims in health care: current perspectives
topic Review
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6697646/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31496861
http://dx.doi.org/10.2147/AMEP.S185912
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