One of the great advantages of living in the 21st century is the access that people have to quality and safe medical care. Though many may not care for the costs of receiving medical treatment or their options for visiting doctors and clinics, when a person goes to a doctor, they may reasonably expect that their care will be competently and professionally provided. Ohio residents have a variety of excellent hospitals and medical care providers to choose from when serious issues like surgery must be considered.
Surgery can be invasive or it may be completed by laparoscopic techniques. Patients who undergo surgery of any kind may have recovery periods that last from days to weeks or months. Therefore, surgical procedures can be significant events in the lives of patients and the doctors who perform them must be fully committed to the health and welfare of those under their care.
As readers of this blog know, however, many problems can come up during surgical procedures. One serious surgical error is the wrong-site surgery. When a wrong-site surgery occurs, a doctor performs the correct surgical procedure on a patient but on the wrong part of their body.
This type of mistake may not seem possible, but it is all too common when doctors must operate on patients’ arms, legs and other body parts for which there is a right and a left. A patient may require a procedure in their left lung only to emerge from surgery to find out that the surgery was done on their right lung. Wrong-site surgeries can happen in different ways, are medical mistakes and therefore may be compensable to patients as medical malpractice claims.