Surgery can be an invasive necessity for western New Yorkers who suffer from certain medical conditions. When other options are not available, they may choose to undergo operations to improve their lives through better health. As individuals who have had surgery may know, though, surgical procedures do not happen without risks.
Medical care providers have a duty to take necessary precautions and preventative efforts to ensure their surgical patients receive the right procedures and requisite care. However, too many fail in their duties and cause their patients’ harm through preventable surgical mistakes. When medical care providers do not do their jobs, patients pay through worsened medical conditions, pain, suffering, and sometimes life-threatening harm.
Common types of surgical errors
It may seem unbelievable, but surgical errors do happen. They can manifest in several ways, including but not limited to:
- Wrong patient surgeries
- Wrong site surgeries
- Wrong procedure surgeries
In all these cases, a patient receives an operation that they do not need or that is performed on the wrong part of their body. Wrongful surgical procedures can cause patients additional suffering and do not remedy their underlying health conditions for which surgery was originally proposed.
Prevention in the surgical field
Preventing surgical errors often comes down to employing common sense approaches to identifying and protecting patients’ medical information. For example, patients can play an active role in their pre-surgical preparations and can be asked to confirm their procedures and conditions to health care personnel to ensure the right preparations are made. Similarly, health care providers can physically identify patients’ surgical sites through positive and negative marks to indicate where surgical procedures should be done.
Avoiding surgical errors is a duty of health care professionals that can go overlooked. Victims of surgical errors may have medical malpractice claims to help them seek compensation for their losses.
