Undergoing intensive treatment in a medical setting requires faith in the professional providing care. Patients who require surgery are especially vulnerable and must put their lives in the hands of the doctors treating them.
There are rigorous standards in place to help limit poor surgical outcomes. While unpredictable incidents can occur during surgery, the vast majority of surgical incidents are the result of preventable mistakes or oversights.
Doctors may not be liable in cases where factors outside of their control complicate procedures, but poor surgical outcomes can be a sign of malpractice in certain cases. A small number of patients every week experience never events in medical facilities during surgical procedures. Those patients or their families may have grounds for medical malpractice lawsuits.
What is a never event?
Health care professionals and researchers define surgical never events as errors that are so egregious they should not happen in a well-managed medical practice. Many of these mistakes have life-altering consequences for the patients involved. Some of the most common are also shockingly obvious errors that the surgeon or anyone supporting them during the procedure should be able to identify.
In some cases, doctors perform surgery on the wrong part of the body. For example, they might replace the wrong knee joint. Other times, doctors perform the entirely wrong procedure, possibly because they have a full schedule with back-to-back operations. Another common never event involves surgeons accidentally leaving objects inside of patients after a procedure.
Any of those mistakes can have major consequences for the patient. They may require a second surgery or may be ineligible for the care that they initially required. They may have a much longer recovery time, a poor prognosis or more functional limitations because of the surgical mistake that occurred.
How can people respond to never events?
Patients who experience gross errors in surgery in their family members may need help validating their concerns that the surgical error they experienced was medical malpractice. Generally speaking, any errors that prompt professionals to ask for a signed waiver after the procedure or that another health care professional could have entirely avoided may constitute malpractice.
Patients may also have rights in scenarios where doctors fail to inform them ahead of time of the side effects, risks and failure rate of a procedure. Patients undergoing surgery should provide informed consent with full knowledge of the risks involved. In scenarios where patients were unaware that the procedure was likely to fail or where a surgeon made a major and preventable mistake, they may have grounds for a medical malpractice lawsuit.
People hoping to hold surgeons or hospitals accountable for medical errors usually need legal representation while preparing for a medical malpractice lawsuit. Reviewing medical records with a lawyer can be the first step toward medical malpractice litigation. A successful lawsuit can help diminish the lasting consequences generated by a surgical error.