Patients happier when docs discuss side effects

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Hospital patients who suffer a side effect from treatment are more likely to give high ratings to their quality of care when hospital staff are up front about what went wrong, a new study suggests.

In a survey of nearly 2,300 patients treated at 16 Massachusetts hospitals, researchers found that 603 had some sort of "adverse event" -- most often side effects from a newly prescribed drug or complications from surgery -- during their hospitalization.

When asked whether hospital staff had explained the problem to them, only 40 percent of patients said they had.

Yet, when staff did discuss the problem, patients were more likely to be happy with their care -- even when the adverse effect was a preventable one, the study found.

"Our findings show that disclosure is associated with patients' perception of higher-quality care, even when they were harmed by an adverse event," lead researcher Dr. Lenny Lopez, of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, said in a statement.

"We believe this is the first study to address how disclosure affects the quality-of-care impression in patients who actually were harmed during the course of their treatment and may reassure physicians and others who worry about the consequences of disclosure," he added.

Using hospital records and patient interviews, the researchers found that almost one-third of adverse events in the study were preventable -- being related to errors such as giving patients the wrong dose of medication.

Hospital staff were less likely to discuss preventable adverse events with patients compared with ones that could not be avoided -- such as an unforeseeable reaction to a new drug. When patients suffered a preventable effect, staff explained the problem to them only 30 percent of the time, Lopez's team found.

Yet, patients tended to give their care higher quality ratings when a problem was explained to them, even when the complication was preventable.