If you (or your loved one) have been harmed or injured during your care at a hospital, clinic, or other healthcare organization, you have the right to know what happened, ask why it happened, and ask for help. Here are 8 steps you can take to get the help you need.

You’ve been told to speak with someone on your healthcare team after a problem in care occurs… but how to talk about it? What should you bring to the discussion? Here are a few tips to help you feel prepared when speaking to your healthcare team.

Before you call or write a healthcare organization to talk about a problem in your care, read through this list of helpful tips, including how to prepare and what you may want to talk about.

You’ve already reached out to a healthcare organization to discuss a problem with your care. Now what? Here are a few tips for what to do during and after communication.

Sometimes you need to contact someone in healthcare leadership after there is a problem in care. Here are some tips to find the the right person to contact.

Sometimes the path to a resolution can be challenging. The patient, healthcare provider, or facility may choose to hire a mediator to help facilitate the EDR process. A mediator can help all parties discuss concerns and ensure that individual needs and interests are addressed. 

System-Focused Event Investigation and Analysis Guide, AHRQ Communication and Optimal Resolution (CANDOR) Toolkit: The "Solutions Meeting" section of this guide (and Appendix F) offer a walk-through on how to run an action planning meeting. It includes brainstorming, evaluating solutions for effectiveness and sustainability, measurement, and a description of the expected outputs.

Quality improvement (QI) projects often use surveys to gather data, but expertise in survey design isn’t always available to every project team. A recent study(1) illustrates the unpredictable quality of locally developed surveys for QI, showing that development of surveys requires special expertise in addition to careful consideration and time.

Clinical assessments play a vital role in providing the information healthcare professionals need to better care for patients. And while clinical assessments include such important data as function, behavior, and personal history, many of these tools also include an evaluation of skin color.

In this episode of the Tradeoffs podcast, we hear from Dr. Jeff Goldenberg and Naomi Kirtner, who lost a child to medical error.