Surgeons make mistakes. They commit errors. Patients trust them with their very lives, but surgeons are human, and they do not always uphold that trust. This happens due to negligence, carelessness, distraction and many other reasons.
Mistakes that they make vary, but three common ones are:
- Operating on the wrong location on the patient’s body
- Operating on the wrong person or doing the wrong procedure
- Leaving some sort of object behind so that it stays in the person’s body
Not all mistakes are deadly, but they can be. Say that the foreign object left behind is a scalpel or a needle. Even something as simple as a sponge could lead to infection.
When surgeons carry out the wrong procedures, there are two ways for the mistake to turn fatal. First off, perhaps the patient can’t handle that surgery. For instance, if someone is deemed in too poor of health for heart surgery and then undergoes surgery anyway, due to a surgeon’s error, they could pass away during the procedure. This is just one example but subjecting any person to a surgery they were not prepared for is a risk.
In other cases, the person could die because they didn’t get the right surgery. Maybe they had a blockage in their heart that needed to be removed, but the surgeon did the wrong procedure and did not remove it. They could then have a heart attack. They don’t pass away on the operating table, but that mistake still leads to their death.
These errors are far too common, and the families of those who die need to know what legal options they have.