If a Doctor makes a mistake...?

[Anonymous]

Doctors often get praised for saving peoples lives, but if they make a mistake they could get sued

Mistakes happen in any job and to any person, but is it wrong to say that a doctor was slightly mistaken and it resulted in complications or their death

Unless it wasn't something where they were being grossly negligent, should they(and are they) accountable for miscalculations or slip-ups?

[selfishstars]

It's not a black and white issue.

Doctors do make mistakes, however, most of those mistakes are negligible. But obviously, sometimes mistakes can have a huge adverse affect on their patient. However, doctors and other health care professionals are PEOPLE. And people are fallible. We make mistakes. The majority of health care professionals are doing the best that they can, but mistakes will still happen.

You also have to consider that often mistakes are made as a result of systemic problems. In nursing (I'm an RN), there's a shift away from a "culture of blame" to a "culture of safety". That means turning the focus away from blaming and punishing a person for committing an error, and looking deeper into why the error happened and what we can change systemically to prevent those errors from occurring again. An example of this is something like changing the colors of the label or looks of two medications that are often mistaken for each other. Like, gravol and benadryl are often confused for one another, so now, one comes in a ampule and the other in a vial (bottles that look different), and when our orders print out, it will say "dimenHYDRINate" or "diphenHYDRAMine" (to highlight the difference in the name so that they're not confused). There is research going on in the hospital I work at all the time to identify why errors are happening and changes that we can make to our system to prevent them from happening.

However, there are still a lot of systemic problems that have yet to be addressed. For example, nurses work 12-hour shifts (including night shifts). Doctors often work 24-hour shifts! Here, residents work six 24-hour shifts a month on top of their regular 12 hour shifts. As I'm sure you can imagine, it would be difficult for anyone to keep a sharp-mind when they're entering their 23rd hour of work---yet doctors are expected to do so. But this is something that's hard to change, because we work these long hours both for the PURPOSE of safety in one sense, even though it decreases safety in another (the reason why health professionals work these long shifts is related to "continuity of care" which is based on the idea that it's better for information/care to pass through less people, because each time information is passed along, there's the chance of things getting missed or duplicated, and thus, errors being made).

So, to answer your question: Do I think that doctors should be held accountable? Yes. However, I think the way they should be held accountable needs to be reflective of the mistake made. Sometimes I think that just having the error brought to their attention is enough (because for most health care professionals, finding out that you made an error, even if no one was harmed by it, weighs heavily on your mind). If an error is made, it certainly should be reported and a discussion should be had about why it happened and how it can be prevented. In some cases, additional action should be taken (like having to go to on

[selfishstars]

probation, being required to obtain additional education, being demoted from senior resident to junior resident if the doctor isn't fit to take on the responsibilities of a senior resident, etc.). But things like being sued or a doctor losing their license should be limited to mistakes caused by gross negligence (and in cases like this, a hearing is held to determine if the error was caused by negligence).

And to be frank, if health professionals could be sued or lose their license over any

[selfishstars]

mistake they made, not very many people would be willing to go into these professions.

[Anonymous]

Yes, they should be. Unlike other jobs, doctors are dealing with people's lives. People go to them because they trust them to do their job well and to help them with whatever they're dealing with. If things go wrong and it's because the doctor made a mistake, they should be held responsible for it.

[Anonymous]

Unfortunately, many procedures are in place specifically to eliminate the most frequent kinds of errors. And those procedures are routinely ignored by doctors who think they know better.

So yeah, sometimes it's worth sueing them, because sometimes they have been deliberately and ignorantly negligent.

When a doctor removes the wrong leg, for example. Or the wrong kidney. Or the wrong lung. It's happened often enough that there are now clear guidelines for preventing it. Like writing on the leg in magic marker "REMOVE THIS ONE"

And all it takes is some doctor to go "I know a f***ing sick leg when I see one, I don't need a magic marker to tell me..." and bang, you've lost the wrong leg.

Should that guy be sued? Damn straight he should.

[cjwright79]

Well you know, it's liking cooking, you don't have to be too precise, things will work out if there's a little more sugar than usual, a little less water, cooked a little longer, allowed to get cooler for 30 seconds. There's a certain margin of error. Go way outside those margins and yeah, then you're taking malpractice.

What I'm saying is that small mistakes won't really have a big effect on the patient, so no one's too bothered. A small mistake probably won't even be noticed -- and it could hardly even be called a mistake in fact. Just 'variance'.

[noobseaplenty]

One of the biggest cause of death comes from mistakes made by doctors, that's why it's important to think for yourself, most doctors are not going to get into trouble and YOU in the end are the one that is choosing to take the medicine (most of the time, sometimes it is forced on you like in mental health related issues)

What you can do?

Only take medication, or have surgery, or go to a hospital as a very last resort.

Educate yourself on the medication you are being given or the procedure you are going through

Seek alternative treatments, always get a second or third opinion even if it's from a doctor in the same hospital. Sometimes two doctors working side by side can have a different opinion and it's up to you to choose the one you think knows what they are actually doing

[Anonymous]

I think sometimes stuff happens, and sometimes it might be as a result of a client not be 100% truthful. If it is something huge and something obvious it is bad but if it just happens it is not his fault

[Anonymous]

It's malpractice their license must be revoked and whatever charges were held.