Nurses have the ethical obligation to prevent and manage medical errors. Ethical theories for justification of stance are provided along with suggestions for disclosing errors to patients.
The patient safety imperative began with the landmark report "To Err is Human" (Kohn, Corrigan, & Donaldson, 2000), which shocked the public by revealing that as many as 98,000 people die annually as a result of medical errors. Other research followed that supported the seriousness of the problem (Blendon et al., 2002; Healey, Shackford, Osler, Rogers, & Burns, 2002; Starfield, 2000).
A 3-year study (Cook, Hoas, Guttmannova, & Joyner, 2004) conducted in 29 small, rural hospitals in nine ...