Is it Surgical Malpractice if an Infection is Left to Lead to Sepsis?

Surgical malpractice can take in many possible types of harm or injury. Most dramatically, there’s wrong-patient or wrong-body-party surgery. There’s foreign-object-left-in-body malpractice. There are surgical procedures which are simply done badly or wrong. And then there is the case of an infection left after surgery, which leads to sepsis.

What is Sepsis?

Sepsis, often called “blood poisoning,” is a wide-spread and dangerous bodily response to an infection. It can be a life-threatening condition: organ failure and precipitous drops in blood pressure are common reactions to sepsis. Technically, sepsis is a body-wide inflammatory response. If you’ve ever had major inflammation in an infected area, you know how painful it can be; now imagine the stress on your body if, in reaction to an infection, you experience inflammation all over. It comes about when an infection is large enough, lasts long enough, and/or is severe enough to trigger a body-wide reaction.

What is Malpractice?

Not all medical care is successful; not all surgical procedures end well. As much as we may wish it otherwise, medicine and medical professionals are not infallible. The fact that a patient does poorly in response to a procedure does not, by itself, mean that the medical care providers are liable for malpractice.

Instead, there must have been some failure of care—“malpractice” literally means “bad practice,” after all. If a medical care provider is careless in some way, or not trained to the standard he or she should be for his or her specialty or practice area, that may be malpractice, since in that case, the patient is not getting the care he or she should.

Surgical Malpractice Leading to Sepsis

Sometimes surgery is specifically to clean out an infection; when that’s the case, if the medical team or surgeon was careless and left some infected material behind, that could be malpractice. Also, surgery often leads to infection, since there’s an open route into the body, hospitals are full of germs, and the immune system is often weakened or compromised by the stress on the body or by medications given. Because post-surgical infection is common, medical care providers should be on the look-out for it; if they fail to spot or treat it and it leads to complications, like sepsis, that could also be malpractice.

How an Attorney Can Help

It’s not always easy to tell when a bad outcome was simply bad luck or was bad practice. It’s also not easy to understand what a malpractice case might be worth. If you had a bad surgical or post-surgical outcome, you should speak with a medical malpractice attorney, who can help you understand if you have a case and what it might be worth.