Preventable Medical Mistakes Cause Malpractice
If you listen to the folks who favor tort reform, it would seem that there is no such thing as medical malpractice in this country. The premise that is thrown into the public discourse again and again is that our legal and medical system is completely under siege from trivial and unnecessary lawsuits. The idea is that every time something goes either mildly or very wrong during the course of a medical procedure, then that doctor is immediately subject to a financially crippling lawsuit, which causes the malpractice insurance rates to go up, which then causes doctors everywhere to quit practicing medicine.
The main players in this supposed disaster is, of course, trial lawyers. If it weren’t for trial lawyers, so the argument goes, everyone would see reason instead of dollar signs after something bad happens at a hospital or doctors office.
This is a very convenient scenario to have out in the public, but we can tell you that this is not even remotely close to how things really work. Greenberg and Bederman does not take on the malpractice case of every single person who has had something unfortunate happen in a hospital, or any medical facility. A number of things can go wrong during a course of treatment, but having something go wrong is not necessarily malpractice. Only when a doctor or other healthcare provider deviates from the standard of care, can there be an investigation into possible medical malpractice.
The truth of the matter is this: Sometimes, doctors, nurse practitioners, nurses or pharmacists make mistakes. Sometimes they make easily preventable mistakes. And sadly, sometimes these easily preventable mistakes cost people their lives.
A recent study in the Netherlands backs this up:
In the current study, the researchers identified the main reasons for errors in 294 successful claims related to surgeries from 2004 to 2005. They then compared those to the items on a comprehensive surgical checklist called SURPASS, which is now used in several hospitals in the Netherlands.
It should be mentioned that this checklist is not an immensely complicated document. It includes simple things like making sure that the procedure is scheduled correctly, and that all of the needed instruments are available, or even marking which side of the patients body is going to be operated on. It’s not unlike the pre-flight checklist that a pilot and co-pilot go through before they take off.
When the researchers compared the successful medical malpractice cases to the items on the checklist, they found that 29% of the malpractice cases were directly related to something that was left off of the checklist. It wasn’t a daring surgical procedure that went wrong. It wasn’t a random action of the body that was blamed on the doctor. It was an easily preventable mistake that could have been prevented if someone had taken the time to make sure that the procedure was properly set up. It was a lack of communication among the hospital staff. It was misread handwriting. It was a scalpel that wasn’t available.
Since patients can’t be expected to handle these things themselves, the responsibility for all of this lands directly on the hospital staff. If a patient or the family of a patient comes to us and explains that their loved one was killed or injured because of a breach of the standard of care, and this was something easily preventable, it’s hardly “abuse of the system” if we try to hold the people responsible accountable.
According to the article, only 25% of American hospitals use any kind of pre-op checklist at all. And while we absolutely dispute that the rate of medical malpractice cases in America is somehow overblown or unsustainable, we have to wonder what the results would be if more hospitals made some sort of pre-op checklist a mandatory part of their practices. After all, medical malpractice cases aren’t filed for fun. They don’t fall out of the sky. They happen because of preventable mistakes, and it appears that by using these checklists, doctors and surgeons all over the country could lower the amount of those preventable mistakes by a considerable margin.
Greenberg and Bederman is a medical malpractice injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal assistance to those who have been injured by a doctor, surgeon or other medical professional. If you or a loved one in Washington, D.C, Virginia or Maryland (including Baltimore) has been injured due to medical malpractice or surgical errors, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free legal consultation today.
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