Surgical Errors

Patients in New Mexico who are wondering if having a surgical procedure is safe might be interested in a report on wrong-site surgery. This error occurs in orthopedic, podiatric, urological, neurosurgical and general surgery procedures. The prevalence might be largely...

New Mexico medical practitioners will sometimes opt to settle a medical malpractice lawsuit outside of the courtroom. When making the decision whether or not to accept the settlement offer, injured patients might want to gain a better understanding of why a doctor or...

It may be of interest to New Mexico residents to learn about recent reports regarding hospital errors. Hospitals along with attending medical professionals possess a certain responsibility and are typically expected to avoid surgical mistakes such as administering the...

While patient safety is an important concern to New Mexico residents, national statistics indicate that the progress in reducing medical errors over the last 10 years has been limited. More obvious errors include surgery on wrong body part cases, issues for which...

A recent case of medical malpractice shows the unfortunate roadblocks that are placed in front of victims of poor medical care. We are talking about medical malpractice caps, which limit the amount of money a plaintiff can earn in their lawsuit. The case isn't from...

What if a terrible surgical error changed your life in almost every conceivable way? What if a surgeon's mistake caused you to lose limbs, and lose certain senses, and to endure serious medical conditions that were literally heart-stopping? Wouldn't you do everything...

While the following story didn't occur here in Albuquerque, or New Mexico, or even the United States, it will still resonate with people here because of the incredible medical circumstances involved. A man in England was given a vasectomy when he was supposed to...

How in the world can surgical teams leave objects (such as sponges) behind in patients' bodies? The question has been a source of consternation for years - and is still a pressing problem. To be sure, the movement toward the use of surgical checklists has finally...

Perhaps inevitably, surgeons tend to see patients through the lens of surgery. And to the extent that this is the case, it would certainly include the estimated one-third of people in the U.S. who are generally classified as obese. In recent years, doctors have...

In the first part of this post, we sketched the origins of the movement to develop checklists to help prevent medical errors. As we noted, two of the key figures were Atul Gawande and Peter Pronovost. More than a decade ago, Pronovost proposed a protocol for...