Saying Sorry: Failure in Medicine

Humanity and human interactions make medicine beautiful, but they also make error and failure inevitable parts of the field. Failures in medicine range from struggles on medical school exams and pimp questions to medical error, and in each of these situations, we benefit ourselves and our patients by treating “failures” as opportunities to learn and grow rather than as shameful secrets. Within a three part series on Failure in Medicine, we explore medicine’s deep-seated discomfort with “failure” and ways we can better manage our mistakes. For part 1 of this series, we talk with Dr. Thalia Krakower, an Internal Medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital about her piece “To Err is Human, To Apologize is Hard” in which she describes her family’s experience suffering from medical error. Dr. Krakower’s story emphasizes the importance of confronting medical mistakes personally, institutionally, and with patients. Find Dr. Krakower's piece at https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2782182.