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MONDAY, Oct. 6 (HealthDay News) -- Only about half of U.S. pediatricians surveyed in a new study said they'd disclose a medical error to the family of a child under their care.
Many said they were much more likely to admit the error when it was an obvious one.
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Medication errors, never a pleasant subject, are particularly tricky when it comes to children and their often protective parents, experts say.
"It's more challenging sometimes with kids because they're more vulnerable and often mistakes can be really serious ones with young children," said Dr. Wendy Levinson, professor and chair of medicine at the University of Toronto. "The stakes and the sense of vulnerability of kids is different."
Levinson is author of an editorial accompanying the new study; both appear in the October issue of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.
The issue of medical errors -- and how to prevent or deal with them -- is beginning to get more attention.
"Understanding of when doctors do or don't disclose errors is really an evolving field," Levinson said. "There's a ripple in the background that we know that bad things happen and we make mistakes but we don't talk about them with one another. We're embarrassed about them. We're slowly bringing them to the fore and people are talking about them."
Perhaps even less is known about errors in children, although that knowledge base is increasing as well.
In April, the group that accredits most U.S. hospitals, the Joint Commission, issued guidelines, including standardized weight of children in kilograms, to help prevent medication errors in hospitalized children.
This alert closely followed publication of a study that found that medication errors, including accidental overdoses and adverse reactions, affect about one in every 15 hospitalized children. That number is much higher than previous estimates and underscores growing concerns about medical errors involving hospitalized children -- an issue that generated headlines in November when actor Dennis Quaid's newborn twins were accidentally given life-threatening overdoses of a blood thinner.
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