When Patient Handoffs Go Terribly Wrong
September 4, 2009
I have always felt uneasy about patient handoffs, transferring my responsibility as a doctor to another physician. We cannot be on duty all the time, but I worry that I am playing some real-life medical version of the children’s game “Telephone†where the complexity of my patient’s care will be watered down, misinterpreted and possibly mangled with each re-telling. I wonder, too, if it is only a matter of time before the kind of mistake that happened to Joey (not his real name) might happen to one of my patients. (New York Times)
