Sentinel Injuries

Potential Biases

CHAMP Education for Child Abuse Medical Providers

  • Perceptions including patients, families, agencies and medical colleagues
  • Reporting biases
  • Diagnostic and cognitive biases
  • Halo effect and affinity bias
  • Intervention
    • Use protocols for evaluation when possible

Accessible Version

We need to recognize that there are many potential biases in the disciplines that work with families, especially surrounding suspected child maltreatment. There's a lot of people involved who have perceptions about patients, families, the agencies and their medical colleagues. We also need to recognize diagnostic and cognitive biases. As well as the halo effect in an affinity bias. I want to highlight the halo effect which is a cognitive bias that occurs when a person's overall impression of someone is based on a single identifiable trait. And there's certainly also reporting biases which occur when the decision to report is more dependent on the magnitude of the findings, rather than there was a finding. All of these types of biases are incredibly important to recognize. One of the ways that we work to combat biases in this field of medicine is using protocols for evaluation whenever possible. To that end, we have age-based protocols for index cases of suspected child maltreatment as well as their siblings.