Injured During Surgery: What Comes Next
Healthcare providers are designed to diagnose patients and offer suitable treatments, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t examples where more harm than good is achieved. For example, if a patient goes into a hospital for surgery but the surgeon makes a mistake, the consequences could be permanent, or even deadly. If you’ve been injured during surgery, you deserve compensation, so let’s take a look at what comes next.
What is Surgical Negligence?
Surgical negligence, which comes under the umbrella of medical malpractice, is the legal term given to physical or psychological damage caused during surgery, as a result of wrongdoing or carelessness.
Surgeons can make errors for a number of different reasons ranging from gaps in training to actively taking shortcuts. When a reputable Dungannon solicitors firm takes on a medical malpractice case, they conduct thorough investigations to find ‘causation’ and ‘breach of duty’.
Breach of duty refers to direct evidence of surgeon wrongdoing. Causation is proving that the sustained injuries were a direct result of the negligent actions, which is often the tricky part. Luckily, high-quality solicitors will take on this task for you.
Common Examples of Surgical Errors
The body is a complex yet delicate machine, which means that the smallest errors can be catastrophic. Although it’s true that mistakes can be made by anyone, it’s literally a matter of life or death when they come from surgeons. There are many different mistakes a surgeon can make, but these are the most common:
- Surgery in the wrong place. On the back of communication issues or blatant negligence, some surgeries take place in the wrong place, which may see healthy organs removed.
- Leaving behind foreign objects. Surgeries require a lot of equipment including gauze, scalpels, and surgical clamps. If these are left inside a patient, they can cause serious pain and may become infected.
- Inaccurate anaesthesia doses. Anaesthesia helps with pain during surgery, but too little or too much can have serious consequences. In the most serious cases, an overdose of anaesthesia can be fatal.
- Carrying out incorrect surgeries. Some errors start with inaccurate administration and lack of communication. If surgeons have wrong information, they may perform surgeries on patients that don’t need them.
- Avoidable injuries resulting from surgery. Some injuries can be found to have been completely avoidable.
How to File a Surgical Negligence Lawsuit
The first step in filing a negligence lawsuit and winning fair compensation is making first contact with decent solicitors. After an initial consultation, which is often free, agreements to represent will be written up. When everything is signed, solicitors will start collecting essential evidence straight away, which leaves little time for records to go missing or memories to fade.
Upon reviewing all the evidence, your lawyer will come up with a suitable rate of compensation to attempt a settlement. If this route doesn’t work, preparations will be made for court proceedings. While your lawyer will speak on your behalf, you need to be ready to take the stand if need be.
Attending surgery should yield positive results, but this isn’t always the case. If you’ve suffered an injury during surgery, make sure contact a lawyer and start the claims process now.
Shubham Kansal is a bit addicted to the latest happening in the political and sports world. He loves to watch anime & manga, suspense, and Horror web series. He used to search and writes about the latest political, sports, and popular celebrity biography.
