Surgery/Medication

Surgical mistakes and medication errors are two forms of medical malpractice. Surgical errors have embraced a lot of topics during the course of many procedures.

MR. JERRY A. LINDHEIM: Surgical error has basically embraced a lot of topics intraoperatively during the course of many procedures. There is orthopedic surgical mishaps. There are anesthesia procedures. There are laparoscopic, which is microsurgery type of procedures. Many complications arise during a very specific type of procedures, the most specifically being an infection, hospital-acquired infections, infections associated with actually the appliances that are placed in, whether or not it is a knee replacement, whether or not it is a mesh, where certain things that are foreign to our body. A lot of infections do develop after the surgeries themselves, which then brings in the questions of post-operative management. You have situations with nurses and their assessment of patients in fevers, in ulcers and other skin breakdowns that have to be properly monitored. Medication errors are probably one of the largest mishaps that happen nowadays, especially with a lot of new medications being put out into the market. There’s a lot of causes with medication errors from simple handwriting mistakes that physicians make with regard to illegibility, how clearly they write it down and then when a patient takes that to the pharmacy, the pharmacist is trying to figure out what is written. So you have problems with the actual medication being given that’s wrong, you have dosage problems where the correct dosage is not given and then you have over-medicating. You have questions associated with generics versus brand names so there’s a lot of over [break in audio]. If a patient is given two or three medications, you have to be concerned about the interactions, the adverse effects, the reactions to the patients. There’s a lot of allergies that patients have to medications. It’s incumbent on the physicians, the nurses to know what a patient’s allergies are. So there’s a lot of mishaps associated with medications that really stem from simply writing the wrong medication, giving too much of the medication, because if you give too much medication, obviously, it has toxic effects. If you give too little of medication, it’s not effective and, therefore, you can have problems with not having the appropriate dosage. We will look and assess a lot of the bottles, get the scripts from the pharmacy. A lot of those have to go back to the chain of command which comes back from the doctor’s office. These are the checks and balances that really run from the doctor to the pharmacy because the patient is taking what they believe and entrust to the doctors. A lot of the patients are not picking up the PDR or Physicians Desk Reference to know and they’re just trusting their pharmacy that what they’re getting is accurate. So without necessarily a picture to show them what pill they’re taking, they assume that what they’re taking at home is what was prescribed.