(taken from abstract) Developing effective strategies for priority for health-services research. Because it is understood that consumers can play an important role in prevention, it is critical to know how consumers view and understand the risks of different medical errors. We propose to explore consumer risk perceptions so that we can begin to anticipate how consumers will respond to medical-error reporting as that process begins to unfold in communities, Using a well-established and robust risk-assessment methodology, the specific aims of the present proposal are: (1) to determine how consumers perceive the risks of different medical errors and (2) to assess consumer willingness to engage in actions to prevent these errors. Strong relationships are predicted between the perceived risk of a medical error and the characteristics of the perceived risk (e.g., the degree to which that medical error is viewed as dreaded, preventable, observable, etc.). In addition, it is expected that consumers' willingness to perform actions to prevent medical errors (and their desire for government intervention) will be linked to the level of perceived risk and the perceived degree of preventability of the specific type of error. The extent of risks perceived from different medical errors will also be placed in a larger context of the perceptions of other non-medical risks (e.g., nuclear reactors, bicycles). Understanding -how risky and how preventable consumers view different types of errors will be a necessary prerequisite to engaging consumers as partners in the effort to prevent errors.
