Medical malpractice: Why is it so hard for doctors to apologize?

Fixing a system built on blame and revenge will require bold ways of analyzing mistakes and a radical embrace of openness.

By Dr. Darshak Sanghavi
The Boston Globe
Originally posted on January 27, 2013


DANIELLE BELLEROSE WENT THROUGH HELL for two years trying to conceive, undergoing nine rounds of fertility treatments before she finally got pregnant with twins in late 2003. Shortly thereafter, the then 28-year-old nurse and Massachusetts native developed a complication that required months of bed rest at home. Suddenly, on a June night nearly three months before her due date, Danielle’s uterus began bleeding profusely. At 4:56 a.m. she had an emergency caesarean section at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Her daughters, Katherine and Alexis, entered the world weighing only about 3 pounds each.

Everything seemed to go well until the end of the first week. When Danielle and her husband, John, visited the unit, Alexis looked fine, but Katherine appeared mottled and pale. Panicked, Danielle found a nurse, and testing confirmed that Katherine was in profound shock due to necrotizing enterocolitis, a devastating intestinal complication that affects premature babies. The infant’s blood had turned acidic. An X-ray indicated a tear in her bowel. Just after midnight, Katherine was taken by ambulance to Children’s Hospital Boston.

Extremely premature infants such as Katherine and Alexis are entirely unprepared to live outside their mother’s womb. After only 30 weeks of gestation, the newborn heart isn’t fully developed, and the intestines can’t easily digest breast milk or formula. At that age, a baby’s brain often doesn’t remember to breathe. In 1963, when President John F. Kennedy’s son, Patrick, was born prematurely, the only thing to do was “monitor the infant’s blood chemistry,” as a newspaper of the day put it. Patrick Kennedy died after two days. By the time Katherine Bellerose was being cared for in the same hospital, however, new treatments had increased survival rates in very low birth weight infants to 96 percent.

Still, at Children’s Hospital, Katherine struggled to survive. Surgeons made a last-ditch effort to save her life by removing her colon, in the hope that this would halt further damage. She failed to improve. Multiple rounds of CPR were performed.

The rest of the story is here.