Surgical Errors

Transplant operations are a marvel of medical science. Many people have heard of cases where someone donates a kidney to a friend or loved one. Indeed, in New Mexico and across the nation, kidney donation stands as a recognized symbol of self-giving service. Other...

Let's continue with a theme we've been exploring regularly in recent posts: going to the hospital should not make people sicker, but often does. As we noted earlier this week, sometimes this is due to hospital-acquired infections. In this post, we will take note of a...

Hospital checklists are more than an idea whose time has come. Research is now beginning to show that such checklists can be effective at preventing errors in the delivery of medical services. As we will discuss in this two-part post, however, in order for checklists...

New Mexicans advised to have robotic surgery may be wise to heed a New Jersey woman's experience as a warning to proceed only after expert consultation about every available medical option. After suffering a severe internal burn injury during a robotic hysterectomy in...

When New Mexico residents enter a hospital for surgery, they face a certain amount of risk. Regardless of the relative simplicity of a procedure, there is always the possibility for something to go wrong. Ideally, physicians will have explained the risks of the...

We spend a lot of time on our New Mexico medical malpractice blog discussing the mistakes surgeons make and how they can be prevented. We have seen studies in the past that have found that doctors who are tired or distracted make more surgical errors in the operating...

For many Albuquerque residents, knowing that a loved one has suffered some kind of surgical complication is often difficult to ascertain. Even surgeries that are deemed to be successful can leave patients looking overwhelmed, at least to the untrained eye. However,...

One of the most preventable errors that can be made during surgery is leaving an object behind in a patient's body. While there are several ways to combat this issue, it continues to occur; in fact, on average, about two people each year die as a result of items that...

In many kinds of technology, one way to make things safer is to remove the human element from the equation. For example, while the idea of self-driving cars might strike some people as dangerous, a large percentage of today's motor vehicle accidents are caused by the...

As many of our Albuquerque readers know, sometimes it only takes a miniscule error in a patient's medical treatment to cause a big unintended effect on that patient. This is what occurred in 2011 with an otherwise healthy woman in California, who entered a hospital...