Indianapolis Hospital Malpractice Attorney

Common Types of Hospital Negligence

Diagnostic Errors

Misdiagnosis, failure to diagnose and delayed diagnosis represent a significant portion of hospital errors. The failure to order the proper tests may cause a misdiagnosis or delays in making an accurate diagnosis.

Misdiagnosis of Cancer

Malpractice in the misdiagnosis of cancer may involve failure to order proper tests, failure to evaluate test results, failure to refer the patient to a specialist and failure to identify obvious physical symptoms. The most common types of cancer that are misdiagnosed include colon cancer, lung cancer and breast cancer. A delay in the diagnosis of cancer may allow the disease to advance and make the condition more difficult to manage.

Never Events

Certain types of serious hospital errors are totally preventable and should never occur, hence the name. Examples of never events include operating on the wrong body part, performing the wrong procedure on a patient, leaving a surgical tool in a patient, or allowing a patient to develop pressure ulcers. Medicare has adopted a policy of refusing to pay for treatment involving never events to pressure hospitals to do more to improve patient safety.

Surgical Errors

Numerous factors can cause surgical errors, including lack of safety protocols before surgery, communication problems between the surgeon and operating room nurses, having more than one surgeon involved, time pressure to finish a surgery, and failure to monitor a patient adequately during and after surgery and respond to changes in the patient’s condition.

Wrong Operation

Surgery on the wrong body part or the wrong person happens all too often because of breakdowns in communication between members of the surgical team—nearly half of the severe medical errors reported at Indiana hospitals in 2014 involved surgery.

The Indiana Department of Health report identified 21 surgeries on the wrong body parts and 4 wrong surgical procedures performed on patients in 2014. The problem is common enough that the federal Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations published a protocol for healthcare providers to follow that includes a “timeout process” to prevent wrong operations and wrong-site surgery. Unfortunately, a fifth of our hospitals have not adopted the protocol.

Retained Surgical Items

Surgical teams may inadvertently leave a sponge or other surgical tool in a patient, leading to infections that can be serious or fatal. The errors are more common in emergency surgery, unexpected changes in surgical procedure, and when surgical teams do not follow the safety protocol of doing item counts.

Retention of foreign objects is one of four most commonly reported serious medical errors, according to the Indiana Department of Health. Some items are designed and intended to be left during surgery, such as surgical clips, staples, etc. However, sponges and surgical instruments are not intended to be left.

Emergency Room Errors

Unreasonable delays in seeing a patient may cause ER errors, failure to order proper tests, failure to diagnose, lack of monitoring of a patient, or communication breakdowns among staff.

Emergency rooms are fast-paced environments, but medical professionals are still expected to provide patients with quality healthcare delivered at or above the medical standard of care. Still, many emergency room errors occur every year.

The Doctors Company, a medical malpractice insurance provider, conducted the Emergency Medicine Closed Claims Study, which evaluated 332 closed medical malpractice claims based on emergency room care. The study found that the most common emergency room errors were:

• Diagnostic errors, including misdiagnoses and delays in diagnosis
• Treatment management failures, such as failing to stabilize a trauma patient’s neck to prevent paralysis
• Wrong and inappropriate treatments for the patient’s condition
• Medication failures, which occur when an emergency room provider fails to order medication necessary for the patient’s condition

Researchers found that the majority of these errors were caused by patient assessment mistakes, such as failing to order tests or not establishing a differential diagnosis.

Medication Errors

Medication errors are among the most common type of malpractice error and a significant cause of preventable injuries and deaths.

Anesthesia Complications

Any mistake in the dosage or type of anesthesia or the failure to monitor a patient when sedated can cause serious injury and wrongful death. An anesthesiologist may fail to check if a patient has known allergies to a medication or fail to determine if anesthesia will adversely interact with other medications the patient is taking.

Birth Injuries

The most common preventable errors during delivery are failure to control blood pressure in women who have high blood pressure, failure to monitor vital signs after Cesarean section, hemorrhage after Cesarean section and failure to react to a change in the vital signs of the fetus prior to delivery.

If you suspect that you or a loved one has been harmed by hospital malpractice, seek the guidance of a knowledgeable Indiana medical malpractice lawyer. Prevention is key in dealing with hospital negligence if you have an upcoming procedure; be sure to check out our resources, including important questions to ask before surgery.

How Hospital Injuries Occur

Hospital errors frequently occur as a result of failures in hospital systems or lack of safety protocols rather than individual mistakes.

Hospitals may have conditions that contribute to serious errors such as issues with medicine storage, a lack of timeout procedures in operating rooms, inadequate communication and documentation, high staff workloads, or problems with inadequately maintained medical equipment.