Surgical Errors That Lead to Malpractice Claims

We are at our most vulnerable when unconscious and incapacitated during surgery, placing our trust, health, and very lives into the hands of a surgeon and their surgical team. Unfortunately, sometimes a surgeon or medical team makes a serious error during surgery, resulting in irreparable harm.

While not all adverse surgical outcomes are medical malpractice, when the negative outcome is the result of medical malpractice, it’s a physically, financially, and emotionally devastating experience. Reach out to our surgical error attorney in Chicago for legal assistance.

What Types of Surgical Errors Constitute Medical Malpractice?

According to medical research journals, a surgical error is an outcome that is not a known acceptable risk of the surgery, but the potentially catastrophic result of a mistake. Surgical errors typically fall under the following categories:

• Wrong-patient surgeries
• Wrong-site surgeries
• Wrong-side surgeries
• Surgical tools left in body cavities
• Mislabled surgical specimens
• Accidental injuries, such as organ perforation, a severed blood vessel, or nerve damage

Surgical errors such as wrong-site, wrong-side, and wrong-patient surgeries are considered “never events” by medical professionals due to the catastrophic consequences.

Anesthesia errors may also occur during surgeries and lead to medical malpractice claims, but these are often categorized as medication mistakes.

What Causes Surgical Errors?

All hospitals and surgical centers in the United States must adhere to meticulous protocols to ensure that they perform the correct surgery on the correct body part for the right patient. Despite these universal protocols, surgeons and their surgical teams were responsible for approximately 9,000 surgical errors classified as “never events” over a recent 10-year period. The most common causes of surgical errors include the following:

• Staff communication failures
• Inadequate staff training on safety protocols
• Incomplete patient assessment
• Administrative errors
• Surgeon distraction
• Surgeon fatigue or burnout

It only takes one mistake on the operating table to cause permanent harm, such as loss of limb, organ loss, permanent scarring, shortened life expectancy, or death.

Proving Medical Malpractice After a Surgical Error

An alarming Baylor College study reveals that about 5% of surgeries have an adverse outcome, and about half of these result from surgical errors, amounting to about 400,000 preventable surgical injuries and deaths.

Proving that an adverse surgical outcome results from medical error requires showing that the case meets the following legal tenets of medical malpractice liability:

• A doctor/patient relationship existed at the time the malpractice occurred
• The provider owed a duty of care to treat the patient at the level of care accepted by the medical community
• They breached their duty of care through negligence
• The breach of duty directly caused injury
• The injury victim suffered damages from the injury

Damages from surgical errors are often catastrophic. In the worst cases, a medical malpractice claim after a surgical error becomes a wrongful death claim by a grieving family member.

What Damages Can I Recover In a Surgical Error Malpractice Claim?

A serious permanent injury may require additional surgeries or could leave the patient facing catastrophic consequences. Common damages recovered in successful medical malpractice claims include past and future medical expenses, past and future income loss, reduced earning ability, and catastrophic injury damages for loss of limb, loss of vision or hearing, organ loss, permanent scarring, or diminished quality of life.

Contact our Chicago medical malpractice lawyers from Smith LaCien today at (312) 509-8900 for a free consultation.