Hospital Errors Can Be Devastating
When you are in need of the services that a hospital provides, you rely upon that hospital to supply you with quality care and you are extremely vulnerable to any mistakes made in the process of that care. Unfortunately, hospitals and their staff members are not immune to mistakes and errors. Sometimes, however, these errors are indicative of a breakdown in the institution’s framework of safety mechanisms. Such errors are known as “never events” for the very reason that they should never happen in the first place. If a hospital never event has left you injured, you need an experienced Central Texas medical malpractice attorney.
Medical Malpractice
Medical malpractice is defined as any medical professional’s (or medical institution’s) failure to provide normally accepted treatment that ultimately results in injury to the patient. When this specific failure refers to an event that should have never happened, it is known as a never event or a sentinel event. Such errors include blatant mistakes like performing an operation on the wrong patient, performing the wrong operation on a patient, and performing the correct operation on a patient’s incorrect body part. While this level of error is not common, never events do happen and their consequences are often physically, emotionally, and financially devastating.
Medical Facilities and Their Protocols
When a major error like a never event takes place in a hospital, it is indicative of a breakdown in the medical facility’s safety protocols, which is the system of checks and balances that is put in place to prevent such egregious accidents from happening. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) shares that WPSEs – wrong-procedure, wrong-patient, wrong-site errors – are often precipitated by a disconnect in the communication pathways that begin with the initial consultation and ends with the final surgery. As such, the responsibility can lie with any number of medical professionals and/or with the hospital itself.
Never Event and Associated Damages
Never events are mistakes of such magnitude that the associated damages are difficult to overestimate. If you are the victim of a never event, you have been denied the treatment you needed to help recover your health; this is compounded, however, by the fact that you have also been exposed to a surgery (and its attendant side effects) that you did not need in the first place. The consequences of such errors are vast – often including financial, physical, and emotional devastation. If you have been harmed by a hospital’s malpractice, you need the skilled guidance of experienced legal counsel immediately.
If a Hospital Error Has Left You Injured, Consult with an Experienced Central Texas Medical Malpractice Attorney Today
Surgical errors are among the most devastating medical errors, and the resulting negative consequences are exceedingly difficult to overcome. The experienced medical malpractice attorneys at The Law Office of Brett H. Pritchard in Central Texas have the skill, commitment, and compassion to fight for your rights and for the compensation to which you are entitled. We are here to help, so please contact or call us at (254) 220-4225 today.