Cases of medical malpractice can be dangerous, demoralizing, and expensive. When an Ohio resident suffers a preventable injury or ailment due to the negligence of their doctor, they should know that they have rights and options for becoming whole. Although not every undesirable medical outcome is the result of a medical mistake, medical malpractice is a problem for Americans across the country.
Medical malpractice incidents can occur in clinics, offices, and hospitals. They can plague the diagnostic processes of physicians or the interpretation of treatment notes by nurses and other medical staff. One place that may medical mistakes occur is the operating room. When doctors and hospital staff members commit errors in the context of surgical procedures, those mistakes are considered surgical mistakes.
There are 3 different categories of surgical mistakes that occur too often in operating rooms throughout the nation. They are:
- Wrong-site mistakes;
- Wrong-procedure mistakes; and
- Wrong-patient mistakes.
A wrong-site mistake involves an operation that happens on the wrong part of a patient’s body. These mistakes can happen when the operation is side-specific, such as on the patient’s right arm and the procedure is done on their left arm.
Wrong-procedure mistakes occur when medical teams perform the wrong operations on patients. A patient may agree to undergo surgery to have a torn ligament fixed and wake up having had an organ removed. This is an extreme example to highlight this significant medical malpractice issues.
When a wrong-patient mistake occurs, a person can be subjected to the operation of a different person and may endure serious complications from that procedure that they should not have had to experience. When patients are improperly identified or wrongly identified by hospitals, wrong-patient mistakes can occur.
According to the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality through the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, these surgical mistakes are considered “never events” because they should never occur in American hospitals. The failure of medical facilities to undertake comprehensive patient identification and procedural checks can lead to these and other potentially life-threatening forms of negligence.
Medical malpractice can affect the lives of victims long into their futures. Victims of surgical mistakes often must heal from erroneous procedures before they may have surgeries to fix their underlying health needs. When the wish to better understand their options for seeking compensation, they may choose to solicit the advice of knowledgeable and compassionate personal injury attorneys.
