The Impacts of Disclosure and a Proactive Compensation Offer on Chinese Patients' Actions After Medical Errors

This study aims to obtain evidence of the impacts of error disclosure and the impacts of a proactive compensation offer on Chinese patients' actions after medical errors.

A total of 915 responses were collected from a questionnaire survey. Two fictitious cases (entailed moderate and severe harm) that involved error disclosure were described. One of 5 disclosure and compensation types was randomly provided to each participant. The 5 types were combinations of 3 disclosure types (no disclosure, partial disclosure, and full disclosure) and 2 proactive compensation offer categories (no offer and an offer), with the exception of no disclosure but a proactive compensation offer. The respondents were asked about their willingness to take actions if they were the affected patient.

The generalized ordinal logit regression model showed that error disclosure did not increase the likelihood of the patients taking action, such as changing physicians, complaining, or filing lawsuits. A proactive compensation offer decreased the patients' willingness to file lawsuits but had no significant influence on the other action choices. In addition, the patients' actions were affected by other factors, such as the severity of the error, age, sex, education level, being religious, prior error experience, and health insurance.

We suggest that "disclosure and compensation" programs are developed in China. To ensure their implementation, it is recommended that appropriate training is provided and that the disclosure culture in health care organizations is improved. Furthermore, laws or regulations are required that govern error disclosure and provide support for health care professionals and organizations.