HOSPITALS WEIGHING APOLOGY POLICY:

August 22, 2005

Some of Harvard Medical School’s teaching hospitals may add a lesson for their doctors: how to say sorry. The Boston Globe reported that a national specialist on patient safety, Dr. Lucian Leape, has helped the hospitals draft the policy for physicians to acknowledge medical errors to their patients. The policy, if adopted, would create a uniform response to some of medicine’s most difficult situations at Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Children’s Hospital Boston.