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The Ethical Health Lawyer: To Tell or Not to Tell: Disclosing Medical Error

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

William Winslade  and
E. Bernadette McKinney
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Extract

When a health care professional contacts a health care attorney for advice about how to deal with a medical error involving a patient, what is the most ethically appropriate response? Honesty is the best policy; the ethical health lawyer should advise the client to tell the patient the truth. This advice is neither naïve nor impractical, as we will show. More importantly, it is without question the right thing to do for a number of sound reasons. It may not be a natural inclination or an easy task to accomplish; several countervailing factors discourage health professionals from telling patients the truth about medical errors. However, we will argue that resistance to truthful disclosure can and should be overcome by rational arguments that also take into consideration the psychodynamics of the patient-health professional relationship.

Type
JLME Column
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 34 , Issue 4 , Winter 2006 , pp. 813 - 816
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2006

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References

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