Why don’t they say they’re sorry?

So, my other grandmother was in the hospital. She had symptoms that made it look like she had stenosis decreasing the drainage of her cerebral spinal fluid. This put pressure on her brain. The test to figure out if this is really the problem is pretty simple and sounded like a win-win proposition. But, for some reason, doctors don’t seem to recognize that sticking needles and scalpels around the spines of elderly women with osteoporosis will generally lead to complications. I don’t actually think you can call it a complication if you should expect it to happen, though.

Let me be clear, this topic pisses me off. Not much does, really, but a similar arrogance about the cohesion of an osteoporotic spine, over the long run, killed my mom’s mom. And then the day we memorialized my mom’s mom, my dad’s mom started a month-long hospital stay, with a couple scary weeks in the ICU, because of a problematic procedure that was supposed to keep her in the hospital for a few hours, max.

On the other hand, I am fundamentally a medical professional. I recognize that good practitioners can make bad mistakes and as much as I hate it when it happens to me and mine, that some times you just have to correct the damage and move on. Also, it’s hard to be angry at the doctors when it’s obviously an institutional problem—This happened at two hospitals in two different states. My guess is that stats are aggregated over sex and age and osteoporosis diagnoses, and so these procedures look far less risky than they are. So why would I get mad at a doctor for screwing up, like we all do, based on information he thinks is correct?

But at University of California at Irvine Medical Center (and I’m calling them out on purpose, because they need to change their culture if they don’t want to be evil), nobody apologized. Two weeks later, nobody had apologized. Eventually there was one surreptitious, whispered apology from the resident, but that was it. There was never acknowledgment that there was a hospital-level problem, or that perhaps the policies needed to change to protect similar patients.

I don’t get this. Why wouldn’t they apologize? I know what you’re going to say—law suits and all that. But studies have now shown that being truthful, honest, and offering just compensation reduces lawsuits and expenditures. It also allows both doctors and patients to feel human.

Even more importantly, without disclosure, it’s very difficult to prevent recurrent mistakes. All the residents learn is to hide their mistakes, and all their supervisors learn is to deny them. How is it possible, then, to change anything? When a hospital like UCIMC does respond, it is often after many little errors have built up into something major, and their response may be to blame the doctor who made the mistake rather than recognizing their own systemic flaws that allowed the mistake to happen. So, after they rid the hospital of their “awful” doctor, it will all happen again with someone new. UCIMC has other problems with transparency, too, and all of it adds up to a hospital that isn’t nearly as good as it could or should be.

As a family member, rather than as a medical professional, all I wanted was an apology and the assurance that they would put in place measures to make sure it didn’t happen again. To anyone. When I didn’t get that, I did hope my aunt would sue them. After all I’ve told you, and all of which I honestly mean, my gut, heartfelt reaction was we should sue their frigging pants off just to get them to stop pretending nothing had happened.