The obvious response from the medical profession should have been gratitude: here was an important way

An important clue surfaced at the annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association soon after the study was published.  During the discussion a practitioner stood up and said he simply could not, and would not, accept the findings, because admitting to his patients that he had been using an unsafe treatment would shame him in their eyes.  Other examples of such reactions to improvement efforts are not hard to find.

Indeed, it is arguable that shame is the universal dark side of improvement.  After all, improvement means that, however good your performance has been, it is not as good as it could be.  As such, the experience of shame helps to explain why improvement, which ought to be a "no brainer", is generally such a slow and difficult process.

What is it about shame that makes it so hard to deal with?  Along with embarrassment and guilt, shame is one of the emotions that motivate moral behavior.  Current thinking suggests that shame is so devastating because it goes right to the core of a person's identity, making them feel exposed, inferior, degraded; it leads to avoidance, to silence.

The enormous power of shame is apparent in the adoption of shaming by many human rights organizations as their principal lever for social change; on the flip side lies the obvious social corrosiveness of "shameless" behavior.

Despite its potential importance in medical life, shame has received
little attention in the medical literature: a search on the term shame in Medline in November 2001 yielded only 947 references out of the millions indexed.  In a sense, shame is the "elephant in the room": something so big and disturbing that we don't even see it, despite the fact that we keep bumping into it.

An important exception to this blindness to medical shame is a paper published in 1987 by the psychiatrist Aaron Lazare which reminded us that patients commonly see their diseases as defects, inadequacies, or shortcomings, and that visits to doctors' surgeries and hospitals involve
potentially humiliating physical and psychological exposure.

Patients respond by avoiding the healthcare system, withholding information, complaining, and suing.  Doctors too can feel shamed in medical encounters, which Lazare suggests contributes to dissatisfaction with clinical practice.

Indeed, much of the extreme distress of doctors who are sued for malpractice appears to be attributable to the shame rather than to the financial losses.  Also, who can doubt that a major concern underlying the controversy currently raging over mandatory reporting of medical errors
is the fear of being shamed?

What are the lessons here for those working to improve the quality and safety of medical care?   Firstly, we should recognize that shame is a powerful force in slowing or preventing improvement and that unless it is confronted and dealt with progress in improvement will be slow.  Secondly, we should also recognize that shame is a fundamental human emotion and not about to go away.  Once these ideas are understood, the work of mitigating and managing shame can flourish.

This work has, of course, been under way for some time.  The move away from "cutting off the tail of the performance curve" that is, getting rid of bad apples towards "shifting the whole curve" as the basic strategy in quality improvement and the recognition that medical error results as much from malfunctioning systems as from incompetent practitioners are important developments in this regard.

They have helped to minimize challenges to the integrity of healthcare workers and support the transformation of medicine from a culture of blame to a culture of safety.

But quality improvement has another powerful tool for managing shame.  Bringing issues of quality and safety out of the shadows can, by itself, remove some of the sting associated with improvement.  After all, how shameful can these issues be if they are being widely shared and openly discussed?

Here is where reports by public bodies and journals like Quality and Safety in Health Care come in.  More specifically, such a journal supports three major elements: autonomy, mastery, and connectedness.  These motivate people to learn and improve, bolstering their competence and their sense of self worth, thus serving as antidotes to shame.

British Medical Journal 2002;324:623-624 March 16, 2002