What is it about?
This article describes a mnemonic-based system that can be used in both teaching and clinical practice to help clinicians reduce the risk of diagnostic error. It emphasises the importance of medical knowledge, focused clinical assessment & diagnostic reasoning in establishing the correct diagnosis & provides a symptom-based, patient safety-focused system to help ensure that clinicians come to the consultation appropriately prepared for their patients. During the consultation, in can be used as a diagnostic error checklist, as part of a two-stage approach to diagnosis. Post-consultation, it can be used to help clinicians reflect, review and discuss cases.
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Why is it important?
Errors in diagnosis are relatively common and frequently result in serious harm to patients. However, it is believed that up to 80% of these errors are avoidable and yet very little work has been done to reduce the risk of these errors. This is in direct contrast to the attitude that has been adopted to reducing the risk of treatment errors, even though diagnostic errors are twice as common as treatment errors and more likely to result in serious harm to patients.
Perspectives
Errors in diagnosis have the potential to cause serious harm to patients and the WHO has declared that reducing the risk of diagnostic errors in primary care should be considered a global priority. This article describes a mnemonic that can be used in an integrated and systematic approach to preventing & detecting these errors.
Dr Paul Philip Silverston
Anglia Ruskin University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: SAFER PRACTICES: reducing the risk of diagnostic errors, Practice Nursing, February 2020, Mark Allen Group,
DOI: 10.12968/pnur.2020.31.2.80.
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