Doctors, nurses, surgeons and all other professionals practicing medicine are held to a very high standard and have the duty to apply their complex and significant education, knowledge and skill towards healing those who have fallen ill or injured.
As a consequence, the legal issue arrises, when a medical professional makes a serious error, of negligence and liability for the resulting injury. Medical malpractice laws are designed to compensate those patients injured by a medical mistake, or negligent treatment, for all their pain, suffering and expenses.
As a secondary function, medical malpractice laws also act to hold medical professionals’ responsible for applying their craft with the utmost care and regard for their patient health.
Prevention of Medical Negligence
While their are no statistics that can conclude that medical malpractice claims have made a significant impact on the incidence of negligent treatment, many hospitals and medical associations have, as a result of medical negligence claims, taken great strides to ensure the chance of mistakes is minimized.
With pressure from hospitals, government, and their own medical malpractice insurance providers, health professionals are constantly evaluating current practices and implementing new protocols to minimize the incidence of medical error and patient injury.
As an example, as the result of an increasing incidence of wrong site surgeries, many hospitals have adopted a stringent, almost excessive protocol, which forces the entire surgical staff to mark surgical sites, confirm the correct site independently of each other, confirm with the patient, and finally, confirm, for each surgical team member the correct surgery site.
While some surgeons believe this is excessive and a waste of resources, ensuring a patient does not lose an arm or leg to a mistake requires such extensive measures.
While protocols like this are great steps towards minimizing the incidence of medical errors, it is ultimately up to the doctors to take seriously the potential for patient injury, and adhere to the guidelines in order to make sure patients are treated competently.
Some nurses have admitted that surgeons will often skip some of the wrong site surgery protocols, and just “get on with it”. Incidents like this are the reason that medical malpractice laws are in place and medical professionals continue to be litigated against, until all conform to the standards put in place.
