Patient Safety, Professionalism, Ethics, and Practice Management
What to know
Safety culture (error reporting, root-cause analysis, checklists), informed consent, shared decision-making, conflict of interest, billing/compliance, and professional conduct.
Concepts to master
- Just culture: distinguish human error, at-risk behavior, reckless behavior.
- Informed consent: capacity, voluntariness, disclosure of risks/benefits/alternatives.
- Error prevention: time-outs, independent double-checks, barcode/ID verification.
- Ethics: truth-telling, confidentiality, avoiding conflicts.
- Practice management: coding, documentation, peer review.
Traps
- Blaming individuals for system errors rather than fixing processes.
- Assuming consent is a signature - it is a process.
- Overlooking conflict-of-interest disclosure.
Rule of thumb
Report, don't hide. Near-misses are learning opportunities; a just culture encourages reporting and fixes systems rather than punishing honest error.
Worked example
A wrong-site setup is caught at time-out before treatment. The correct action is to stop, report the near-miss, and perform root-cause analysis - not to proceed or quietly correct without documentation.