Wrong Patient Surgery: How it Can Happen

There are many forms of medical malpractice, but the most dramatic is wrong patient surgery. That is exactly what it sounds like: the wrong patient is operated on. In a way, it’s double malpractice for the person incorrectly operated upon—a procedure was done to them which they didn’t need,  and presumably whatever they were in the hospital for was not done.

How Wrong Patient Surgery Can Happen

At first blush, it’s hard to imagine how wrong patient surgery happens—after all, all these highly trained medical professionals didn’t notice they were operating on an uninjured body part?

However, to understand how this occurs, you need to put aside your image of surgery formed from ER or (for those of you more the author’s age) M*A*S*H. Wrong patient surgery doesn’t occur in the emergency room—when someone is wheeled in with a gunshot wound, a compound fracture, a ruptured appendix, etc., it’s generally clear who needs to have what operated on. No, wrong patient surgery tends to occur with scheduled, non-emergency surgeries.

Consider: most things that need surgical procedures do not show on the surface of the body. Cancer that needs be removed; a heart valve that needs to be repaired; a joint that needs ruptured cartilage scrapped out; an ulcer that needs to be sealed—all these things are not visible until you open the patient up. (And even then, they’re not always visible—for  example, to the naked eye, cancerous tissue, especially if caught early, may not look different from healthy tissue.)

So without any external cues, making sure the right person is operated on depends on two things:

1. the patient, who could—you would think—tell the medical staff what he or she is in the hospital or clinic for; and
2. the hospital’s or clinic’s internal procedures—its paperwork, authentications, ways of identifying patients, etc.

Of course, the patient may be in pain, unconscious, and/or sedated; and even if alert, is likely under stress, prone to deferring to the surgeons (they’re the experts, after all), and may only have an imperfect understanding—at best—of what needs to be done. There may also be a language barrier. So the patient is rarely a good resource for this purpose, which means it all comes down to the hospital’s paperwork and system.

If those systems are flawed, or the wrong data was entered into them, then wrong patient surgery results.

Wrong Patient Surgery is Always Malpractice

Malpractice, or “bad practice,” is when the medical care delivered does not meet the accepted standards of care. Those standards include operating on the right person—which means that wrong-patient surgery is always malpractice. That is, the medical care providers are always liable for the harm or injuries they cause.

How an Attorney Can Help

If you’ve been injured due to a medical provider’s malpractice, you are entitled to compensation: for your pain, for your suffering, for any new or additional medical bills, for any lost wages, for the impact on your health of not having the correct procedure done, etc. A lawyer can help you get the compensation to which you and your family are entitled.