Personal Injury Law

Should Increased Rates of Surgical Error Mean Less Accountability for Doctors?

By Jamie G. Goldstein

For every invasive surgical procedure, doctors are meant to abide by certain protocols. Research indicates, however, that surgical rates of error remain consistent despite numerous calls for reform. A recent column printed in the New York Times indicates that reports of surgeons operating on the wrong, perfectly healthy body part-or in the worst case scenario, the wrong patient-are still rampant.

A study appearing in the Archives of Surgery showed that 27, 370 incidents were reported from 6,000 doctors over a 6 year span. It was previously reported that these rates of error only occurred for about 1 in every 110,000 procedures, but this most recent data seems to indicate the rate in reality is higher. This kind of transparency is a good start, but doesn't include incidents that were unreported (although participating physicians received insurance breaks for reporting these mistakes). Rates of death as a result of medical error as a whole remain at around 100,000 incidents per year. That's more than Alzheimer's disease or diabetes, according to statistics from the Center for Disease Control (CDC).

Inevitably, the health care system must be answerable for these devastating occurrences. Yet, another New York Times column written by President Obama's former budget director Peter Orszag asserts that health insurance reform didn't go far enough to provide more of a 'safe harbor' for doctors who could show they followed accepted 'evidence-based' guidelines. Joanne Doroshow, a columnist for the Huffington Post, aptly points out the recklessness inherent in this perspective. Allowing medical lobbyists and other groups to form their own 'exculpatory guidelines' or safeguards against liability will only work in the favor of doctors rather than patients and don't encourage reform. Individual state experiments for such uniform guidelines in Maine and Florida were not renewed after it was shown they had little to no affect on the costs of malpractice insurance or the viability of medical claims. Clinical guidelines are only one element of a victim's claim of medical error and should not be the sole determining factor in whether a patient has a valid claim in a court of law. The focus needs to be on why these rates of perfectly preventable medical errors are not decreasing rather than increasing doctors' benefits and leaving patients to fend for themselves.

Full post as published by Chicago Personal Injury Lawyer on November 04, 2010 (boomark / email).