On the 26th August 2021, our colleague from team Care 4 Health, Veronika Pačutová, successfully defended her short thesis focusing on „Managing of difficult situations during healthcare providing“ at Pavol Jozef Safarik University in Kosice.

Incorrect decisions or mistakes are also a natural part of the healthcare professions. However, such errors may or may not cause harm to the patient (first victim), healthcare worker (second victim) or even healthcare institution (third victim), depending on their nature or extent. An important part is to know how to admit the mistake and manage it with the possibility to share the reached experience for the benefit of others who might potentially avoid it in the future. Huge examination for healthcare workers has been the crisis situation in recent times, the COVID-19 pandemic, which has taken everyone by surprise. Even before the pandemic, the Slovak Republic and other European Union countries were facing a shortage of healthcare workers for their population. The pandemic has already posed this greatly undersized number of healthcare workers with further increased risks. Confronted them with an unusual burden in constantly changing conditions and thus a higher risk of errors, which could lead to adverse events, which added to the burden the extra burden of survival of the “second victims” while unsatisfactory support measures or interventions ensuring the process of their recovery.  

„The single greatest impediment to error prevention in the medical industry is that we punish people for making mistakes.“ Lucian L. Leape, M.D.