If you feel pain or develop a new health problem after surgery, you may not know what caused it. Some problems come from known risks of the procedure, while others result from mistakes that proper care could have prevented. A surgical error falls into that second group.
No single figure covers every type of surgical error. Studies often give rates for specific mistakes, such as wrong-site surgery. Some of these serious errors are rare, but they still occur.
What do the numbers show?
When you read about surgical mistakes, you may see the term “never events.” Researchers use this term for serious safety failures that health systems work to prevent. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) places wrong-site, wrong-procedure and wrong-patient surgery in this group.
AHRQ describes these errors as relatively rare. One study that AHRQ still cites estimated about one such error for every 112,000 surgical procedures. The estimate shows that these serious errors do occur, though rarely.
Complications are not always errors
A complication after surgery is different from a confirmed surgical error. Some problems can occur even when your care team follows accepted medical standards.
Louisiana law follows that same basic idea. In a malpractice claim against a physician, you generally have to show the proper level of care, how the physician failed to meet it and how that failure caused your injury. The focus is on whether the care you received fell below the proper standard, causing your injury.
What you may do next
If you think a preventable medical mistake harmed you, you might want to request your medical records and keep dated notes about your recovery. Saving records that show when new symptoms began and what your care team told you about follow-up treatment also helps. A complete timeline gives you useful facts should you decide to proceed with a formal claim.
