Medical malpractice can have tragic consequences for patients. When doctors don’t meet professional standards, patients can suffer unnecessary harm or may not get the care they need.
Some forms of medical malpractice are harder to identify than others. It can be difficult to determine when diagnostic errors cross the line between reasonable delays and actionable malpractice. Other types of medical malpractice are relatively apparent because they cause immediate harm.
Surgical errors are among the most dangerous and obvious forms of malpractice that occur regularly in the United States. The worst cases of surgical malpractice may involve never events. Patients who experience a never event during surgery may have grounds for a medical malpractice lawsuit against the surgeon or the facility where the surgery occurred.
What constitutes a never event?
The name of a never event effectively explains what it is. It is a medical issue that should never happen in a safe, well-managed medical facility. Surgical never events are preventable if doctors and the professionals supporting them comply with all existing best practices.
There are a variety of surgical mistakes that professionals may consider never events, but three never events are among the most common surgical errors and the most serious.
- The first is a wrong-site or wrong-side error. These occur when a surgeon operates on the wrong part of the body, possibly by performing the surgery on the wrong side of the body.
- The next type of never event involves wrong-procedure or wrong-patient mistakes. These occur when a surgeon performs a completely improper procedure on a patient, possibly due to a medical records mix-up or an overly full schedule.
- The third and most common of these never events involves retained foreign bodies. Such never events occur when a doctor closes a patient’s incision while there are still foreign objects inside their body, like gauze or part of a balloon used during the procedure.
Surgical never events often have major implications for a patient’s recovery and response to treatment. They can drastically increase the cost of treating a malady and may also increase recovery time, leading to more lost wages.
Patients who experience a never event and families who lose a loved one to a botched procedure may have grounds for a medical malpractice lawsuit. Understanding that some mistakes should never happen in a safe surgical setting can give people the courage necessary to speak up about medical errors.