What Constitutes A Surgical Error?

Depending upon a patient’s medical needs and best course of treatment, surgery may be prescribed by a medical team to provide that individual with relief from an illness or ailment.

While some surgical procedures have been refined to allow patients fast recovery times and minimal discomfort, others require individuals to submit to arduous procedures and significant medical trauma. When New Jersey residents agrees to submit to a surgical procedure, they should know exactly what they are in for and what to expect once their procedure is over.

Getting information and making measured decisions about one’s own medical course of treatment is important to protecting patients’ rights. However, even when patients make informed choices about their care doctors can engage in negligent practices and subject them to harm. In particular, surgical errors cause many patients to suffer unnecessary pain and injury when their doctors fail to operate in responsible ways.

There are several different types of surgical errors that may happen to patients. One type of surgical error that can have lasting repercussions on the health of an individual is a wrong site surgery. This form of error involves a surgeon performing the correct surgery on the wrong part of a patient’s body, such as having a doctor amputate a patient’s right foot when it fact it was there left foot that required medical attention.

Another form of surgical error that can harm patients is a problem identifying the correct patient. Surgeons may perform a number of procedures in any given day. When they fail to recognize which patient is before them on the operating table they may perform a surgery that they planned to perform later in the day on the wrong individual.

Surgical errors cause patients physical pain, emotional stress, and financial loss. These incidents of medical malpractice may be compensable. Personal injury attorneys can help victims of this preventable form of harm understand their options for seeking their damages.