SAN DIEGO – Does rudeness from a colleague prevent physicians from noticing a diagnostic error and challenging it? A new study suggests it might not, at least in the context of hand-offs from dismissive and insulting fellow doctors.
Dr. Michael Avesar
Instead, a simulation found that experience seems to be the key factor in giving physicians the guts – or the awareness – to change course. Still, the findings hint that rudeness may still have a negative effect on one group – resident physicians.
“It appears that we are building resilience somewhere in training,” said study lead author Michael Avesar, MD, a pediatric critical care medicine fellow at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.
Dr. Avesar spoke in an interview following the presentation of the study findings at the Critical Care Congress sponsored by the Society of Critical Care Medicine.
The initial motivation of the study wasn’t to gain more understanding of rudeness in medicine. Instead, Dr. Avesar said, “We started off with trying to find ways to understand how physicians think during high-stakes decisions in stressful or time-limited situations. We wanted to see if people were able to challenge the momentum of diagnostic error. That’s when we learned more about the rudeness literature.”
Yes, it’s true: Researchers have devoted time to studying rudeness in medicine. After all, it’s quite common. A 2017 Israeli study in Pediatrics declared it’s “routinely experienced by medical teams.” That study, also based on simulations, determined that “rudeness has robust, deleterious effects on the performance of medical teams. Moreover, exposure to rudeness debilitated the very collaborative mechanisms recognized as essential for patient care and safety” (Pediatrics. 2017 Feb. doi: 10.1542/peds.2016-2305).
For the new study, Dr. Avesar and his colleagues ultimately decided to explore possible links between rudeness and diagnostic error. To explore the issue, they created a simulation of a hand-off of a pediatric patient from the operating team to the ICU.
In the simulation, the “physician” handing off the “patient” incorrectly noted a diagnosis of sepsis. In fact, the patient had cardiac tamponade.
The physician, played by an actor, was instructed to either act in a neutral fashion during the hand-off or be rude. But rudeness, it turns out, isn’t easy to define, even if we all think we know it when we see it.
“There’s a lot of debate as to what is ‘rude,’ ” Dr. Avesar said. The researchers settled on a level of rudeness that wasn’t “too mean” but was still inappropriate: It featured frequent interruptions during the hand-off, lack of eye contact, and abrupt departures. In some simulations, the actor insulted the colleagues of the recipient of the hand-off.
In other words, Dr. Avesar said, the actor was a jerk.
The researchers tested the “neutral” and “rude” hand-off scenarios in 41 simulations. The physicians who played the recipients of the hand-offs included 11 attendings, 14 fellows, and 16 residents.
Eighty-two percent of the attendings (9/11) challenged the diagnosis, as did 86% (12/14) of the fellows. Only 31% (5/16) of residents challenged the diagnosis; this difference from the other groups was statistically significant.
Half of the eight residents exposed to a “neutral” handoff challenged the correct diagnosis, while only 13% (1/8) of those who were treated rudely did. “While the P value was not significant, previous literature focused on residents supports this trend,” Dr. Avesar said.
It’s possible that certain residents gain the knowledge and experience to overcome rudeness over time, he said. That, he said, leads to an intriguing question: “Could we find out how resilience is learned and how to replicate it?”
Moving forward, he said, the team will try to figure out whether there’s a link between personality types and reactions to rudeness.
Eventually, he said, the team may test ways to reduce the effects of rudeness and boost critical thinking. “We see this as a long-term strategy to enhance medical education and patient safety,” he said.
No study funding is reported. Dr. Avesar reports no relevant disclosures.
SOURCE: Avesar M et al. Crit Care Med. 2019 Jan;47(1):682, Abstract 1412.
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