Every patient who has to have surgery hopes that the surgeon doesn’t make any surgical errors during the procedure. Unfortunately, surgeons are humans, and they will make mistakes at some point. One thing that patients have to decide is whether they believe the issue is an error or mistake.
Many surgical errors are considered major enough that they should always be prevented. These are known as never events, which means that they should never happen during the course of a surgeon’s medical career.
Some examples of these are doing the wrong procedure on the wrong patient or on the wrong surgical site. Anesthesia errors, surgical instruments left behind and nerve damage related to positioning issues are also common surgical errors.
Despite the assertion of many surgeons that safety is a priority, there still errors that occur in the operating room that could be prevented through simple steps. Some of the most common contributing factors to surgical errors are time constraints that require the staff members to rush through patient verification, failure to mark sites of the surgery during the pre-op process and an inconsistent focus on patient safety at facilities.
While many patients want to know the cause of the surgical error, there are some cases in which the cause needs to be determined so that it can be prevented in the future. One way that patients can help do this is to seek compensation through a medical malpractice lawsuit when a surgeon makes an error that can’t be forgiven.
By seeking compensation through medical malpractice lawsuit, you’re sending a message to the surgeon that their behavior during your surgical procedure was unacceptable. Not only that, but you are also letting other people know that there was an issue with your procedure that you’re holding the surgeon accountable for.
Your lawsuit can also result in monetary compensation that can help cover the cost of the additional medical care that you required because of the error, as well as the wages that you were unable to earn while you were going through the healing process.
