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New Study: Stressed And Depressed Doctors Make More Surgical Errors

When we go to a hospital for an operation, we like to think that our surgeon is skilled, educated, and alert. However, although your surgeon may have a stellar education and years of experience, a new study shows that if he is depressed, stressed, or burnt out, he is more likely to make a serious medical error during your operation. While many studies have recently named fatigue as a common cause of surgical errors, this newest reports says that emotional well-being is also a factor in medical malpractice instances. In fact, researchers concluded from this study that the number of hours per week worked and the number of nights on call per week did not effect the number of medical errors made by individual surgeons.

The results of the recent survey issued by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Mayo Clinic showed that 40 percent of the almost 8,000 doctors who responded said that they were burned out – and nine percent of them admitted to making a major surgical error in the last three months. The survey also found that surgeons who were emotionally exhausted made five percent more surgical errors while those who felt withdrawn from their patients made 11 percent more medical mistakes.

The study, which will be published in the Annals of Surgery’s next issue, was able to correlate depression, burnout, and surgical errors, but was not able to say definitively which triggered which. That is to say, making serious surgical errors could also cause physician burnout and depression as well.

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