You expect your doctor to be a professional and give you excellent treatment. Unfortunately, the reality is that doctors make mistakes all of the time. Some reports indicate that these result in millions of injuries annually and around 250,000 deaths.
Below are a few examples of these common mistakes:
- Leaving surgical tools behind. The team is supposed to count all of their tools, but a simple courting error has serious ramifications.
- Giving treatment to the wrong person. That surgery was supposed to be done on Joe Johnson, but the team operated on Jon Johnson by mistake.
- Allowing air bubbles to make it to the bloodstream. A patient’s chest tube is taken out, but the hole isn’t properly sealed and it’s not airtight.
- Making patients wait too long for treatment. The emergency room is crowded and chaotic. A patient isn’t properly entered into the system and is forgotten.
- Causing a wound to become infected. A doctor is in a hurry before surgery, and she doesn’t wash her hands properly. Bacteria gets into the wound and is sown inside, where it causes a serious infection.
- Operating on the wrong part of a person’s body. An infected left leg needs to be amputated. The surgeon reads the files incorrectly and amputates the right leg instead. To make matters worse, when the mistake is caught, the left leg still has to be amputated.
A mistake like this can change your life forever. It can lead to an incredible amount of additional costs, from medical bills to lost wages. You must know what rights you have to financial compensation.
Source: CNN, “10 shocking medical mistakes,” John Bonifield, accessed Dec. 09, 2017