How many times have you or someone in your household been to a doctor’s office, urgent care facility or hospital to receive medical care in the past several years? Such visits might have involved routine medical examinations or unexpected health issues that required specialized treatment and care, such as surgery. Sadly, many people wind up in worse condition after receiving such care than they were prior to surgery due to medical malpractice.
If you’re scheduled to undergo a medical procedure, you understand that there’s always a risk involved. There’s also no guarantee that the prescribed treatment plan will work to resolve whatever issue led you to seek medical support. However, you should never suffer injuries because a medical professional did not do his or her job right. The term “never events” refers to incidents that are easily preventable that occur and cause injury to patients because of medical negligence.
Medical malpractice includes more than just surgery incidents
While many never events occur in operating rooms or in connection with surgical procedures, such as wrong-site surgeries, wrong-patient surgeries or wrong-procedure surgeries, incidents that are preventable and which constitute medical malpractice often occur in other aspects of the health care industry, as well. The following list provides a basic overview on the topic:
- Care management negligence occurs when one provides improper or substandard care in a medical setting, such as medication errors, maternal morbidity during a low-risk pregnancy or delivery, or artificially inseminating the wrong sperm or donor egg.
- Injuries caused by environmental never events include no gas, the wrong gas or contaminated gas delivered through a line to a patient, burns, electrical shock or other injuries in a medical setting.
- Radiology injuries often occur when one mistakenly enters a metal object into an MRI area.
- Never events often include criminal activity, such as abduction or assault in a hospital setting.
The key factor in all such incidents is that they are preventable. Devastation occurs, sometimes including patient fatality, because of an individual’s or group’s negligence.
What can you do about medical malpractice?
You have several options available as a patient or immediate family member of a deceased patient when a never event has caused injury or death in a Hawaii medical facility. Most people start by filing a formal complaint at the medical facility in question. Medical malpractice often leads to litigation, as well. In fact, when similar incidents have occurred numerous times to different patients, recovering victims often ban together to file class action lawsuits.