Medical professionals’ (mis)remembering of a simulated interaction with a patient: A medical misinformation effect

Background: Memory plays a vital role in the reporting of medical errors. Current reporting policies allow clinicians days, or even weeks, to report medical errors. Decades of memory research demonstrates that memories of events can become distorted within minutes of being exposed to misleading information (misinformation). Objectives: Our objective was to assess the extent to which clinicians could accurately recall aspects of an interaction with a patient shortly after the clinicians had been exposed to misinformation. Methods: 13 clinicians individually participated in a simulated interaction with a patient. Shortly after the interaction, we misled the clinicians about several aspects of that interaction. A few minutes later, we tested the clinicians’ memory for those misled aspects, along with other aspects we did not mislead them about. We also asked the clinicians how confident they were in their memory for those aspects. We tested clinicians’ memory for the same aspects of the interaction again 15 working days later. Results: We found clinicians were less accurate when we misled them about certain aspects of their interaction with a patient. Despite being less accurate, clinicians were just as confident about the aspects for which they had received misinformation as they were about the aspects they had not. Furthermore, after 15 working days, clinicians had poor memory for the tested aspects of their interaction. Conclusions: Our results suggest that reports of patient safety incidents could plausibly be compromised by misleading information. Delays between patient safety incidents and the reporting of those incidents could therefore compromise our ability to understand the true causes of medical errors.