Surgery requires absolute precision and an unparallelled understanding of human anatomy. The surgeon, anesthesiologist and nursing staff have to work in perfect coordination to ensure the safety of the patient. Most of the time, surgeries proceed with few issues.
When issues do arise, they might be unusual or unpredictable matters that the medical professionals may not have been able to prevent. Other times, it may be readily apparent that the issues that occurred during surgery were actually the fault of the health care professionals performing the procedure.
Health care safety experts have different categories for different types of surgical issues. The most severe and preventable ones are never events. They are mistakes that should never occur in a well-managed facility. People dealing with the aftermath of one of the three never events explained below may have reason to pursue a personal injury lawsuit on the basis of surgical malpractice.
Items left behind
The idea that a surgeon might leave a foreign object inside a patient seems bizarre and borderline impossible. Unfortunately, retained foreign bodies or items left inside a surgical incision after a procedure are one of the most common never events regularly reported in modern medical facilities. Surgeons might leave gauze or even rigid surgical implements inside of patients with devastating consequences.
Wrong-site mistakes
Perhaps the doctor confuses two back-to-back procedures and attempts to perform a lumpectomy on the entirely wrong part of a patient’s body. Maybe they perform the right procedure, but they make the mistake of operating on the wrong side of the patient’s body. They might replace the wrong hip joint in a patient experiencing severe pain and functional limitation, for example. Wrong-site and wrong-side mistakes are so severe that they may render patients ineligible for the care that they actually require in the future.
Wrong procedure errors
Occasionally, surgeons have multiple procedures that they must perform in a small amount of time. In those circumstances, a surgeon could easily mix up which patient needs to undergo which procedure. If they are not thorough when prepping for each procedure, a surgeon might perform the wrong medical procedure on a patient.
Anytime an egregious error that better attention to detail and record review could have prevented occurs in a medical setting, patients may potentially have grounds to assert that they’ve experienced medical malpractice. Filing a surgical error lawsuit could help people obtain financial relief for the harm caused by a health care professional’s negligence accordingly.
