Pinhead Town Talks

TELLURIDE – A patient’s worst nightmare, a doctor’s perpetual gamble − be it a slip of the scalpel, a false diagnosis or a misinterpreted X-ray − medical errors are inevitable and can trigger a rollercoaster of physical, emotional and legal agony if not handled properly by health care providers and patients.

As many as 100,000 patients die every year, due to negligent medical treatment, reports David Mayer, associate dean for curriculum at University of Illinois. Mayer is back in Telluride for his fifth visit, to participate in roundtable patient safety forums with a team of 32 international health care experts.

Next Tuesday’s Pinhead Town Talk, “Extreme Honesty: Disclosing medical errors and patient harm,” will take place Tuesday, July 14, at the Telluride Conference Center in Mountain Village, 6-7:15 p.m., featuring by Rick Boothman, J.D., chief risk officer, University of Michigan; Tim McDonald, M.D., J.D., chief safety and quality officer for health affairs, University of Illinois; and David Mayer, M.D.

Historically, doctors and hospitals have been trained to “deny and defend” − to avoid admitting fault when faced with a medical mishap or unexpected patient injury. However, health care is undergoing a pivotal overhaul, and malpractice attorneys and physicians alike are discovering that disclosure and open communication are significantly improving safety and decreasing malpractice claims and lawsuits nationwide.

“We can’t make healthcare err-proof, humans are human, but we can make it safer, and we can train health care providers and the next generation of physicians to deal with mistakes in a professional and humanistic way,” says Mayer.

Just last year The New York Times reported that the Universities of Michigan and Illinois experienced a 32 percent drop (over a six-year period) and a 50 percent drop (over two years) in malpractice filings, due to their push for full disclosure education.

“Admission of medical mistakes has lowered the visibility of malpractice and accelerated focus on patient safety,” Boothman says. “Health care providers are realizing that no progress will be made if we are constantly denying what went wrong.”

At the Town Talk, all three medical risk gurus will describe the principles and ethics of patient-physician communication and highlight the advantages of full disclosure. They will discuss the remarkable progress admissions and apologies have made for those who have fallen victim to medical malpractice, and they will answer health care questions from the audience with facts and genuine experience on their side.

Pinhead Town Talks are co-produced by the Telluride Science Research Center (TSRC) and Pinhead Institute, and are sponsored by the Town of Mountain Village Owners Association (TMVOA). Admission is free and there will be a cash bar.

For more information please visit HYPERLINK "http://www.telluridescience.org" www.telluridescience.org or call Nana Naisbitt, TSRC executive director at 970/708-0004.