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Medical Error Prelude

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Submitted By jmarieb4
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With the healthcare industry growing rapidly and the number of uninsured peoples falling just as rapidly due to the affordable care act, perceptions of patients, health, and care are important. The baseline of uninsured people in America is continuing to drop. From 2013, white citizens have dropped 5.3% from 14.3% in March of 2015 while African Americans have dropped 9.2% from 22.4% and even more impressive, is the Latino numbers dropping from 12.3% from the original 41.8% (___) Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation). With these staggering changes in the amount of people being insured and seeking medical services, the preconceptions we have of patients just two short years ago is drastically different than before. “Doctors’ preconceptions and assumptions inevitably play an important part in the diagnostic process, but it is not just in the one-on-one diagnostic encounter that preconceptions affect medical interpretation.” (____)
Some of the assumptions in this case start with Nurse Karing calling Dr. Cural and the doctor assuming that he had further knowledge on his patients than his nurse. He calls the nurse incompetent and is assuming this on the idea that he has a higher intelligence than her and asserting his power over the nurse. The nurse then assumes that Dr. Cural is right as he seems to be very in touch with his patients and that she was simply over thinking it.
Mental models, whether shared or held individually, are “psychological representations of real, hypothetical, or imaginary situations” (Johnson-Laird PN 1998). Although conceptually similar, they distinguish themselves from attitudes in that attitudes, i.e., positive or negative evaluations of a situation, are considered an evaluative subcomponent of mental models; attitudes, along with knowledge and previous behaviors, are the ingredients with which mental models are

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