Years ago, I wrote a blog post about a personal experience with medical errors related to my daughter’s hospitalization. Nearly a decade later, I still receive messages from people sharing their own devastating stories—many of them healthcare professionals with strong health literacy.
I often worry: If those of us inside the system struggle to prevent errors for our own loved ones, what chance does the average patient have?
My newborn daughter (who is now eight and thankfully okay) had newborn jaundice, and our pediatrician sent us to the hospital for phototherapy. After a long night where her lab results kept worsening, she became more lethargic and stopped eating. The team seemed ill-prepared and inexperienced—we quickly became that “crazy family” about to leave against medical advice. I still remember that terrifying night when we felt completely helpless, struggling to advocate for an innocent baby. My wife and I (both physicians) fought to get someone to listen.
🔗 Read the full blog here
In my experience, these are some of the biggest contributing factors to medical errors:
1️⃣ Failure to listen to patient or family intuition and experience
2️⃣ Minimal staffing overnight and on weekends—a troubling trend undoubtedly driven by financial incentives
3️⃣ Lack of supervision in situations where an attending physician should be present 24/7
4️⃣ New graduates—nurses, PAs, NPs, and physicians—being thrown into high-stakes situations with inadequate support
5️⃣ Diagnostic inertia—unwillingness to reconsider or change course after an initial diagnosis
6️⃣ Communication breakdowns between teams and departments—sometimes it seems like the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing
7️⃣ Poor or nonexistent handoffs at shift changes
8️⃣ EMR bloat and inaccuracies that make it difficult to get a clear, real-time picture of the patient’s condition
This is why having a trusted family member or friend as a patient advocate at the bedside is so critical. While most healthcare professionals are compassionate and competent, I’ve seen firsthand how errors—both of commission and omission—happen.
Have you or a loved one ever experienced a medical error or a situation where you felt unheard in the hospital? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
#PatientSafety #MedicalErrors #Doctors #Nurses #HealthcareWorkers #Patients #PatientAdvocacy #HospitalMedicine #HealthcareQuality #HealthcareLeadership