Failure to Treat a Surgical Wound Infection

If your medical care provider (e.g. doctor, clinic, hospital) fails to treat a surgical wound infection, you may have a malpractice case against the provider. That’s because failing to treat surgical wound infections is failing to provide the accepted standard of medical care. And failure to provide the accepted standard of medical care is malpractice.

Why Surgical Wounds Get Infected

How surgical wound infection happens is easy to understand:

• There is an open pathway (the surgical wound itself) for infection to get into the body
• Hospitals are full of germs and bacteria
• The strain of surgery often temporarily weakens the immune system
• Sometimes the immune system is deliberately suppressed, to give a transplant or implant a chance to become part of the body

However, precisely because it is so easy to see how surgical wounds would get infected, there is a duty on medical care providers to watch for, treat, and take steps to prevent surgical wound infections.

Malpractice is a Failure to Meet Accepted Care Standards

Sometimes, despite the best medical care, patients don’t get better, or they even get worse or die. When that happens—when there’s a bad outcome to medical care despite that care being first rate—there is probably no malpractice claim. That’s because malpractice, or literally “bad practice,” is when a doctor, nurse, clinic, hospital, etc. does not provide good or generally acceptable care. When the medical care provider does not give the patient care that meets the generally accepted standards for medical care, that’s malpractice—and the provider may be liable.

Malpractice and Surgical Wounds

Because surgical wounds readily become infected—and everyone knows the risk—medical care providers have to be on their guard for them. It’s not like some unexpected illness, like a man in Alaska who never travelled out of his state contracting a rare tropical disease; in that case, since it’s not foreseeable, it’s likely that  no one would hold the doctor(s) accountable for missing the diagnosis. But surgical infections are readily foreseeable, so if a medical care provider failed to monitor or watch for them, or failed to take effective steps to treat any infections that developed, that may very well be malpractice.

How an Attorney Can Help

Evaluating whether or not there is a viable medical malpractice case is often not easy. An experienced attorney can help you understand if you have a case, what it might be worth, the likelihood of success, and the cost to proceed with it. You can then make an informed decision as to what to do.