1. The Role of Talking (and not Talking) in Helping Physicians Cope with a Medical Error Natalie B. May, PhD Margaret Plews-Ogan, MD University of Virginia Study funded by the John Templeton Foundation

8. “ The chairman of family practice, the guy who’d recruited me to come there, never said a word to me. Not a single word. And nothing could make you feel more abandoned than that. Sure, don’t talk about the case, but wouldn’t it have been nice to have heard from the chairman who’d recruited you to come to say, ‘Listen, I heard about that case, I’m really sorry, it’s a bad situation, of course we can’t talk about the medical details but I want you to know that we think a lot of you and we’ve got your back.’ It would have been nice to have heard that.”

10. “ I was too ashamed to tell any of my colleagues, so I suffered in silence for probably a week or two. Because I thought, if I tell them, they’re not going to trust me to cover their patients, they’re not going to think I’m smart anymore, all of those things go through your head. I mean, you really feel defective, you feel like you’re not up to standards, you know?”

11. “ She’s an artist, she’s wonderful. But, you know, she already has enough of a hard life living with my hours and schedule and through residency and all this and I just felt like it wasn’t very fair to put her through all this. So I just pretended like nothing was going on and I’m pretty transparent so it really wasn’t very good. It was a huge mistake, so in this study you might point out that was not a really good coping mechanism.”

16. “ Initially I broke the bad news to him, and like I said, he was very angry. ‘How could you do this to me, and you know I’m just going to die now because you didn’t follow up on this fast enough.’ So he was pretty angry, and that really hit me hard. And it took all the courage I could muster to go back and see him again, but I felt such a strong need to ask him to forgive me and to check on him and to let him know that I care about him and that I would never mean him any harm. I wanted to apologize.”

18. “ I would be driving down the highway and think about it, see horrible, gross images. I mean, it was like a war scene. Then we brought the Healer’s Art to our hospital, and we each shared a story of loss. I fell apart. They asked me questions which I answered. It was just a way of being listened to. And after that I could feel this burden lifted off of me. I really did feel like everything lifted off of me, and I stopped having those flashbacks, so it was a very powerful healing thing. But obviously it never goes away, but you start by thinking about it and talking about it.”

25. Questions?