Patient’s Perspective

In medicine, an adverse effect is a harmful and undesired effect resulting from a medication or other treatment such as surgery. Adverse events can be either clear cut errors or minor errors that may never have any effect. The perspective of the patient is absolutely not important when it comes to determining whether an adverse event has occurred to a patient. Physicians usually know when something has gone wrong or an adverse event has taken place. In this case, patient perspective is only important and necessary when considering the magnitude of this event.

Quite often, a patient can be unaware of an adverse event occurring. It may be because of the patient being impaired by drugs or having a late reaction to some negative treatment.  Many times patients could go days if not weeks without noticing any problems, which could turn into a major problem down the road for not only the patient by for the physician as well.

Physicians should always be aware of any possible human errors when treating a patient, whom they should take into consideration anytime that treatment has been given. They should make the patients aware to look out for any possible side effects that could result from these errors and be prepared to treat them if they were to occur. Often times, the error could be so blatant that both parties would know right off the bat. While the patient’s perspective is not important that the error has been made, in this case the outcome will always be a result how extreme or negatively the patient feels about the error.