Eliciting the functional processes of apologizing for errors in health care: developing an explanatory model of apology.

Marie M Prothero; Janice M Morse

Commentary

Eliciting the functional processes of apologizing for errors in health care: developing an explanatory model of apology.

June 14, 2017

Prothero MM, Morse JM. Glob Qual Nurs Res. 2017;4:2333393617696686.

View more articles from the same authors.

Apology is an important component of a complete disclosure. This commentary explores the evolution of apology as a safety strategy in health care and how such conversations can help restore the patient–physician relationship after an error has occurred.

PubMed citation

Free full text

Related Resources From the Same Author(s)

Untenable expectations: nurses' work in the context of medication administration, error, and the organization.

February 1, 2023

An insurer's care transition program emphasizes medication reconciliation, reduces readmissions and costs.

July 27, 2016

Hospital rules-based system: the next generation of medical informatics for patient safety.

April 15, 2005

Activating knowledge for patient safety practices: a Canadian academic-policy partnership.

January 30, 2005

Integrating patient safety in the OMFS curriculum: survey of 4-year residency programs.

December 14, 2016

Nurse staffing and inpatient mortality in the English National Health Service: a retrospective longitudinal study.

May 3, 2023

Identification of the barriers and enablers for receiving a speaking up message: a content analysis approach.

August 16, 2023

Safety in home care: a mapping review of the international literature.

October 23, 2013

The influence of professional identity on how the receiver receives and responds to a speaking up message: a cross-sectional study.

March 29, 2023

Tackling implicit bias in health care.

August 17, 2022

Organizational factors that promote error reporting in healthcare: a scoping review.

September 14, 2022

Quantifying discharge medication reconciliation errors at 2 pediatric hospitals.

October 27, 2021

Assigning responsibility to close the loop on radiology test results.

July 12, 2017

General internists in pursuit of diagnostic excellence in primary care: a #ProudtobeGIM thread that unites us all.

April 18, 2018

Medication errors in pediatrics—the octopus evading defeat.

March 6, 2005

Case study: preventing surgical complications at Baystate Medical Center.

November 21, 2007

Interventions and measurements of highly reliable/resilient organization implementations: a literature review.

October 28, 2020

Building safer systems through critical occurrence reviews: nine years of learning.

November 10, 2010

Safety of medication use in primary care.

March 4, 2015

Nurse bias and nursing care disparities related to patient characteristics: a scoping review of the quantitative and qualitative evidence

December 1, 2021

Culture change at the source: a medical school tackles patient safety.

January 31, 2006

A literature review of the individual and systems factors that contribute to medication errors in nursing practice.

September 16, 2009

Medication reconciliation during transitions of care as a patient safety strategy: a systematic review.

March 20, 2013

Four years' experience with a hospitalist-led medical emergency team: an interrupted time series.

November 2, 2011

Interruptions during the delivery of high-risk medications.

June 2, 2010

Individual characteristics that promote or prevent psychological safety and error reporting in healthcare: a systematic review.

May 10, 2023

Misdiagnosis, mistreatment, and harm - when medical care ignores social forces.

April 8, 2020

Lost in translation--silent reporting and electronic patient records in nursing handovers: an ethnographic study.

November 18, 2020

Decreasing surgical site infections by developing a high reliability culture.

February 6, 2019

Quality of outpatient clinical notes: a stakeholder definition derived through qualitative research.

February 6, 2013

Examination of how a survey can spur culture changes using a quality improvement approach: a region-wide approach to determining a patient safety culture.

July 1, 2009

Prevention of wrong-site tooth extraction: clinical guidelines.

October 17, 2007

Effect of a pharmacist-led multicomponent intervention focusing on the medication monitoring phase to prevent potential adverse drug events in nursing homes.

January 30, 2005

Incidence and characteristics of potential and actual retained foreign object events in surgical patients.

July 16, 2008

The ageing surgeon: a qualitative study of expert opinions on assuring performance and supporting safe career transitions among older surgeons.

August 21, 2019

No-fault compensation in New Zealand: harmonizing injury compensation, provider accountability, and patient safety.

January 25, 2006

Increasing adoption of computerized provider order entry, and persistent regional disparities, in US emergency departments.

August 31, 2011

Elucidating reasons for resident underutilization of electronic adverse event reporting.

April 29, 2015

Patient safety, error reduction, and pediatric nurses' perceptions of smart pump technology.

May 7, 2014

Nearly all thirty most frequently used emergency department drugs experienced shortages from 2006-2019.

April 27, 2022

Checklists for assessment and certification of clinical procedural skills omit essential competencies: a systematic review.

April 2, 2008

Crossover of the patient satisfaction surveys, adverse events and patient complaints for continuous improvement in radiotherapy department.

April 20, 2022

In situ simulation: identification of systems issues.

July 10, 2013

The heart of health care: parents' perspectives on patient safety.

November 28, 2012

Governance of quality of care: a qualitative study of health service boards in Victoria, Australia.

May 28, 2014

Through and beyond anaesthesia awareness.

July 28, 2010

The justification for strike action in healthcare: a systematic critical interpretive synthesis.

April 27, 2022

Teamwork in obstetric critical care.

September 10, 2008

Considering chance in quality and safety performance measures: an analysis of performance reports by boards in English NHS trusts.

January 18, 2017

Technical rationality and the decentring of patients and care delivery: a critique of 'unavoidable' in the context of patient harm.

July 25, 2018

Medication reconciliation: reducing risk for medication misadventure during transition from hospital to assisted living.

November 27, 2013

Understanding medication safety in healthcare settings: a critical review of conceptual models.

November 23, 2011

Safety standards: implementing fall prevention interventions and sustaining lower fall rates by promoting the culture of safety on an inpatient rehabilitation unit.

December 9, 2015

The effects of physical environments in medical wards on medication communication processes affecting patient safety.

February 26, 2014

Auto identification technology and its impact on patient safety in the operating room of the future.

May 9, 2007

Mapping the resilience performance of community pharmacy to maintain patient safety during the Covid-19 pandemic.

February 16, 2022

Strategies used by critical care nurses to identify, interrupt, and correct medical errors.

November 17, 2010

An interprofessional qualitative study of barriers and potential solutions for the safe use of insulin in the hospital setting.

April 23, 2014

Operational failures detected by frontline acute care nurses.

March 29, 2017

Improving patients' intensive care admission through multidisciplinary simulation-based crisis resource management: a qualitative study.

September 20, 2023

Unplanned early hospital readmission among critical care survivors: a mixed methods study of patients and carers.

June 27, 2018

Hierarchy and medical error: speaking up when witnessing an error.

April 8, 2020

Patients' experiences with communication-and-resolution programs after medical injury.

October 18, 2017

Adoption of patient-centered care practices by physicians: results from a national survey.

April 26, 2006

Mitigating errors caused by interruptions during medication verification and administration: interventions in a simulated ambulatory chemotherapy setting.

July 2, 2014

'Poking the skunk': ethical and medico-legal concerns in research about patients' experiences of medical injury.

July 17, 2019

Nurses' perceptions of patient safety climate in intensive care units: a cross-sectional study.

February 27, 2013

The PRONE score: an algorithm for predicting doctors' risks of formal patient complaints using routinely collected administrative data.

May 27, 2015

Reducing risks in complex care transitions in rural areas: a grounded theory.

March 22, 2023

Risk perception on the labour ward: a mixed methods study.

April 28, 2021

Patient safety in obstetrics: what aviators, firefighters and others can teach us.

July 9, 2008

Patient safety checklist: keys to successful implementation.

August 9, 2006

Identification of warning signs during selection of surgical trainees.

January 16, 2019

Prevalence of potentially inappropriate medication use in older adults living in nursing homes: a systematic review.

August 17, 2016

What causes near-misses and how are they mitigated?

June 5, 2013

Effect of bar-code–assisted medication administration on medication error rates in an adult medical intensive care unit.

June 24, 2009

The role of feedback in emergency ambulance services: a qualitative interview study.

April 6, 2022

Accountability sought by patients following adverse events from medical care: the New Zealand experience.

November 1, 2006

Physician characteristics, attitudes, and use of computerized order entry.

August 23, 2006

Communication in interdisciplinary teams: exploring closed-loop communication during in situ trauma team training.

December 4, 2013

Expanding what we know about off-peak mortality in hospitals.

May 26, 2010

Negative emotions experienced by healthcare staff following medication administration errors: a descriptive study using text-mining and content analysis of incident data.

December 21, 2022

Monitoring preventable adverse events and near misses: number and type identified differ depending on method used.

June 29, 2022

Predicting and preventing adverse drug reactions in the very old.

June 8, 2005

Improving employee voice about transgressive or disruptive behavior: a case study.

April 17, 2019

Safety events in pediatric out-of-hospital cardiac arrest.

September 13, 2017

Greatest impact of safe harbor rule may be to improve patient safety, not reduce liability claims paid by physicians.

January 29, 2014

Assessing patients 2019 experiences with medical injury reconciliation processes: item generation for a novel survey questionnaire.

May 5, 2021

Claiming behaviour in a no-fault system of medical injury: a descriptive analysis of claimants and non-claimants.

September 6, 2006

Comparison of three methods for estimating rates of adverse events and rates of preventable adverse events in acute care hospitals.

March 6, 2005

Racial and ethnic differences in emergency department diagnostic imaging at US Children's Hospitals, 2016-2019.

January 4, 2021

Learning collaboratives: insights and a new taxonomy from AHRQ's two decades of experience.

March 7, 2018

Prospective evaluation of consultant surgeon sleep deprivation and outcomes in more than 4000 consecutive cardiac surgical procedures.

May 25, 2011

Measurement and monitoring patient safety in prehospital care: a systematic review.

February 24, 2021

Test-retest reliability of an experienced Global Trigger Tool review team.

October 27, 2021

Identifying risks areas related to medication administrations - text mining analysis using free-text descriptions of incident reports.

February 12, 2020

Emergency medical services provider pediatric adverse event rate varies by call origin pediatric emergency care.

August 3, 2016

Outside case review of surgical pathology for referred patients: the impact on patient care.

April 10, 2013

'Care left undone' during nursing shifts: associations with workload and perceived quality of care.

August 14, 2013

Electronic prescribing and other forms of technology to reduce inappropriate medication use and polypharmacy in older people: a review of current evidence.

July 18, 2012

Related Resources

Disclosing medical errors: prioritising the needs of patients and families.

July 5, 2023

Are apologies a way to reduce malpractice risks?.

June 21, 2023

Providers' and patients' perspectives on diagnostic errors in the acute care setting.

February 15, 2023

On Patient Safety.

January 28, 2023

Patient and family involvement in serious incident investigations from the perspectives of key stakeholders: a review of the qualitative evidence.

August 17, 2022

Preferences and perceptions of medical error disclosure among marginalized populations: a narrative review.

August 10, 2022

'More than words' - interpersonal communication, cognitive bias and diagnostic errors.

August 11, 2021

To err Is human, to apologize is hard.

August 4, 2021

The role of apology laws in medical malpractice.

July 7, 2021

Communication about medical errors.

February 24, 2021

Making communication and resolution programmes mission critical in healthcare organisations.

November 11, 2020

Reimagining Healing after Healthcare Harm: The Potential for Restorative Practices.

July 29, 2020

Apology laws and malpractice liability: what have we learned?

July 8, 2020

The patient died: what about involvement in the investigation process?

June 24, 2020

Medical error in the care of the unrepresented: disclosure and apology for a vulnerable patient population.

September 25, 2019

When there's no one to whom an error can be disclosed, how should an error be handled?

August 14, 2019

Apology and unintended harm in global health.

July 17, 2019

Interview

In Conversation With… … Jennifer Schulz Moore, LLB, MA, PhD

April 1, 2019

Interview

In Conversation With… Timothy B. McDonald, MD, JD

April 1, 2019

Taking the blame: appropriate responses to medical error.

January 30, 2019

Patient Safety.

November 21, 2018

What can apologies in the electronic health record tell us about health care quality, processes, and safety?

August 29, 2018

Disclosure and apology: nursing and risk management working together.

August 8, 2018

Disclosure coaching: an ask-tell-ask model to support clinicians in disclosure conversations.

July 25, 2018

Physician gender and apologies in clinical interactions.

January 31, 2018

Iowans' Views on Medical Errors: Iowa Patient Safety Study.

January 31, 2018

Patients' experiences with communication-and-resolution programs after medical injury.

October 18, 2017

Outcomes in two Massachusetts hospital systems give reason for optimism about communication-and-resolution programs.

October 11, 2017

Development of the barriers to error disclosure assessment tool.

September 27, 2017

Mistakes were made (by me).

September 13, 2017

See More About The Topic

Hospitals

Health Care Providers

Medicine

Epidemiology of Errors and Adverse Events

Patient Disclosure

Eliciting the functional processes of apologizing for errors in health care: developing an explanatory model of apology.

Connect With Us

Sign up for Email Updates

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Eliciting the functional processes of apologizing for errors in health care: developing an explanatory model of apology.

Connect With Us

Sign up for Email Updates

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

PSNet Log in

Submit Your Innovations

Continue as a Guest

Continue Logged In

Submit Your Innovations

Continue as a Guest

Continue logged in

New Users to the PSNet site