Having a knees up
A man has filed a medical negligence claim, after he accused doctors “surgically invaded” the wrong knee during replacement surgery at a hospital.
The man filed the suit less than a week ago against the doctor, his surgical assistant and the Orthopaedic Associates, for the May 6th2008 botched right-knee operation, that left him with cartilage damage to his left knee.
The claimant was admitted to the hospital for right knee arthroscopy, right knee partial lateral meniscectomy and right knee ACL reconstruction.
The suit claims that the doctor and assistant prepped the patients left knee and began performing replacement surgery on his left knee.
However, at some point during the operation, both the surgeon and surgical assistant realised they were operating on the wrong knee and began removing the surgical instruments and sutured the incisions on his left knee, the suit alleges. The doctors then continued to operate on his right knee, as planned.
The victim was later diagnosed with chondromalaci patealla to his left knee — a general term indicating damage to the cartilage under your kneecap.
As a result, he has filed a five-count medical negligence charge, which alleges that both the professionals failed to document their medical records that they “surgically invaded” the incorrect knee.
It also focuses on malpractice, as both defendants should have realised it was planned to operate on the patients right knee, but failed to ensure surgery would not be performed on the wrong body part.
An academy of orthopaedic surgeons commented on the case and describes wrong site surgery as a devastating, preventable surgical error caused by “poor preoperative planning, lack of institutional controls, failure of the surgeon to exercise due care, or a simple mistake in communication between the patient and the surgeon.”
The academy revealed that 84% of wrong body part surgery results in payments to plaintiffs, as opposed to 30% of other orthopaedic surgery claims.
The academy stated that wrong site surgery errors can be prevented by the surgeon talking with the patient and then putting his or her initials on the proper operative site with a permanent marking pen before the patient is moved to the location of the procedure.
The surgeon can then look for his initials and operates through them. Pre-surgery checklists, surgical staff taking a “time-out” to discuss the procedure before cutting and correct record-keeping can all help reduce medical negligence.
How common is medical negligence?
Worryingly, medical negligence is growing and as a result, far more patients are receiving improper care and avoidable personal injuries.
A study showed that 42% of people believed they had personally been a victim of medical negligence, 2.4 to 3.6% of hospital admissions were due to prescription mistakes and 2.9 to 3.7% of hospitalisations lead to adverse medication reactions.
Only one malpractice claim is made for every eight medical malpractice injuries and plaintiffs drop 10 times more claims than they pursue.
Lastly, an in-depth interview with 53 family physicians revealed that 47% of the doctors recalled a case in which the patient died due to physician error.
Updated on 8/5/2009