An important task for any surgical residency program is how to evaluate the skills of its surgeons in training. Thorough and effective training, of course, ensures surgeons are equipped to succeed in their work and that patients entrusted to their case will receive...
Surgical Errors
Surgical retention and other errors can be costly: work with experienced legal counsel
Mistakes can happen in any medical or surgical procedure, and even the most skilled of physicians don’t perform perfectly with every patient. Sometimes mistakes have little to no long-term effect, and are nothing to worry about. In other cases, the long-term...
Hospital stops infant heart surgery due to surgical errors
Toward the end of 2011, a hospital in another state began doing heart surgery on infants. By June 2015, no less than nine babies died at the hospital. Michigan readers might be relieved to know that -- finally, in Aug. 2015 -- the program was shut down due to...
Surgical operation complications: study says return to original provider/facility
According to a recent study led by a researcher from the University of Utah School of Medicine, patients who suffer from complications after a surgery do best to return to the hospital where the surgery occurred rather than having the problem addressed somewhere else....
Study: preventable surgical errors are rare, but causes remain unclear
Although we live in a country that offers some of the best health care services in the world, many of us don’t think too much about the possibility that we could be injured by our doctors. Mistakes in medical care do happen, though. In some cases, mistakes are...
Eye Surgeon Pays $1.4M To Settle Unnecessary Surgery Lawsuit
An ophthalmologist recently agreed to pay the federal government $1.4 million to settle a lawsuit against him concerning the False Claims Act. The federal government alleges that Dr. John Arthur Kiely performed unnecessary surgeries on Medicare and Medicaid patients...
How Are Surgical Patients Exposed To Incurable Brain Disease?
Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease (CJD) is an untreatable brain disease affecting one in one million people each year. It is thankful that CJD is rare, because it is often regarded as the human version of "mad cow" disease, quickly transforming healthy brain proteins into...
Surgeon’s Egotism, Drug Use Caused Patients’ Paralysis, Death
The former patients of a surgeon recently filed lawsuits against the hospital that hosted him, arguing that it had knowledge that the doctor was an "an egomaniac, mentally ill, an alcoholic, drug addict or a combination thereof."The lawsuits allege that the hospital,...
Considering Hip Or Knee Surgery? List Of Best And Worst Hospitals
Choose your hospital for hip or knee replacement surgery wisely, as the complication rate can greatly differ. The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) has recorded the number of complications that Medicare patients suffered after receiving knee or hip surgery...
Surgeon Study Finds Correlation Between Skill, Complications
A recent study provided insight into bariatric surgical errors, revealing that the skill of a surgeon largely impacts the likelihood that the patient will experience complications. This conclusion seems straightforward enough, but it's startling that patients of...