Published online June 1, 2006
PEDIATRICS
Vol. 117
No. 6
June 2006, pp.
2281-2282
(doi:10.1542/peds.2006-0901)
If It's in the Paper, It Must Be True: Newspaper Reporting of Pediatric Medication Errors
Gautham Suresh, MD, DM, MS
Department of Pediatrics, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, South Carolina
The mass media have the power to shape the public's perceptions of health care issues, including medical errors, and influence public policy related to such issues. Social knowledge of medications and its influence by the media are well described.1 Since the release of the influential Institute of Medicine report,2 medical errors have had a high profile in the mass media, although media reporting of the report itself was criticized as being flawed.3 Millenson4 claims that the "public shaming" of the medical profession by media reports of medical errors promoted the patient safety movement.
In this issue of Pediatrics, Stebbing et al5 analyze newspaper articles related to pediatric medication errors between 1994 and 2004 from English-speaking countries. They found an increasing frequency of articles on this topic over the decade studied, with Canadian newspapers publishing the highest per-capita rate of articles. Surprisingly, a majority of articles adopted a neutral stance toward the errors reported in them. We do not know if the findings of this study apply to all medical errors, to adult patients, to non–English-speaking countries, or to forms of mass media other than newspapers. We also do not know whether these reports were accurate and thorough, because time and word-count limits often cause journalists to sacrifice comprehensiveness in their reporting. Nevertheless, the findings of this study are heartening in that they indicate a desirable shift within the media from the traditional, blaming approach to medical errors toward one that encourages a "safety culture."
Reporting of pediatric medication errors in newspapers represents a favorable concordance of the importance of this topic in health care with criteria for journalistic interest such as timeliness, proximity, prominence, human interest, drama, and visual appeal.6 In particular, events in which a patient was harmed as a result of a medical error have intrinsic sensationalism and therefore have high journalistic appeal: "If it bleeds, it leads." Therefore, it was not surprising that two thirds of the newspaper reports studied by Stebbing et al covered such incidents. This important study raises several questions worthy of further study about the impact in the regions served by the newspapers of such media reports on patient behavior and attitudes, physicians and health care organizations, health care policy, and the medical-legal climate. It is also worth studying whether the tone of the reports was influenced by the way the involved institution interacted with the media after a patient event.
The findings of Stebbing et al also raise the possibility that mass media can be used as an intervention to promote patient safety by changing the perceptions and behavior of patients and health care providers, similar to other media campaigns aimed at improving health outcomes.7 For example, can the mass media empower patients to remind their doctors and nurses to wash their hands before patient contact and thereby reduce nosocomial infections?
Finally, media stories about errors also have educational value for health professionals. In our medical school, media reports of medical errors are part of the teaching material in a course on patient safety. This approach harnesses the power of stories,8 a power that is absent with statistics about errors. This is one form of the "shared learning" that is encouraged by current approaches to patient safety.
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FOOTNOTES
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Accepted Mar 28, 2006.
Address correspondence to Gautham Suresh, MD, DM, MS, Department of Pediatrics, MUSC Children's Hospital, 165 Ashley Ave, Charleston, SC 29425. E-mail: suresh{at}musc.edu
The author has indicated he has no financial relationships relevant to this article to disclose.
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PEDIATRICS (ISSN 1098-4275). ©2006 by the American Academy of Pediatrics
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