<p>Yea, this is going to top anything mentioned…</p>
<p>A couple of years ago I was on call from Fri 5PM-Mon 8:30AM. By Sunday, I’d been out a lot and had been instructed to go visit a family in a hospital that I wasn’t very familiar with (no excuse). That visit was sort of interrupted when I was called to go to another hospital to meet with another family. The family at the second hospital had some complicated family dynamics going on, and I’d been given a lot of information, including phone numbers of out-of-state relatives I needed to contact. I think what got me was the two patients at these hospitals had the same first name, and I believe the last names began with the same letter. While I was trying to get contact information from the hospital records about a family member from the second family, I got a call that the patient of the first family had died, which was rather unexpected. I’m pretty sure everyone thought he had at least a couple of days left, but something happened after I left the hospital. I was in such shock upon receiving this phone call, that when asked by the nurse at the hospital to contact the family members of the deceased (and I even remember repeating the name to her over the phone, but of course, we were dealing with two different patients at two different hospitals, with the same first name and similar last name), I called a family member of the second family, whom I had met with earlier and was now out at lunch with their adult child, and told them their loved one had just died. If there was any saving grace, the first sentence out of their mouth referenced this couldn’t be true as they just left their loved ones room about ten minutes ago, who was awake and alert, and then mentioned they’d just stepped out for lunch. When they mentioned this, I immediately knew I was talking to the wrong family, and profusely apologized, over and over and over again. In the back of mind, though, I’m thinking there’s another family out there who needs to be notified of their loved ones death. But I’m also so upset about what I’ve done, I want to call my supervisor and tell her before any reporting phone calls come in from the family I called in mistake (after I got off of the phone with them). But I called the family first, then immediately found myself an empty room where I could speak without interruption with my supervisor and spilled the whole story. I then had to repeat the story about two other times, up line from my supervisor over the next two days. As fate would have it, the family I mistakenly had called was very acquainted with my second in line up supervisor (which is one of the reasons this family had chosen our family to work with), so she was able to make a personal connection and hear them out. While they were upset with my phone call, despite them being told that afternoon that the correct family had been reached, they sort of pursued it with the hospital, insisting that they be reassured that the correct family had been contacted. Of course the hospital could not confirm anything as the other patient wasn’t even at their hospital. </p>
<p>When I finally met with the supervisor who knew the family a couple of days later, she was so supportive. She reminded me that people make mistakes, but she had even more faith in me now, because she knew it was a mistake I’d NEVER make again, in seeing how upset I was. It did have to go on my employment record, which I completely understood, but she also said it bode well in my favor that I immediately called and confessed my mistake right after it happened and that I didn’t try to make excuses, cover it up, or minimize what I’d done. </p>
<p>Gotta say, in the course of telling my story to others within my agency, that’s when I learned how many people in health care make mistakes (everyone had their own story of the worst mistake they made), most of them harmless, but it does happen.</p>