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Wednesday, April 3, 2013

When Harm in the Hospital Follows You Home

By Olga Pierce
ProPublica
Originally published March 21, 2013

A slip of the scalpel, an invisible microbe, a minute miscalculation. It's estimated that something goes wrong for more than one million people per year during a visit to the hospital. Some patients experience a full physical recovery. Some are never fully healed.

What follows is a conversation of sorts between some of the 1,550 members of our ProPublica Patient Harm Facebook community and Dr. Gerald Monk, a professor at San Diego State University who specializes in dealing with the aftermath of patient harm for both patients and providers. We asked group members to share their questions and thoughts about the aftermath of patient harm, and then got Monk’s response. What emerges is a portrait of the long journey that begins after the unthinkable happens.

The entire interview is here.