Patients who entrust their health to medical workers have the right to reasonably expect those workers to keep them safe during testing, treatment or procedures of any kind. There is never a 100% guarantee of safety because many medical procedures are inherently risky. However, a Massachusetts patient should not have to worry that he or she will suffer injury due to medical malpractice.
In this state and beyond, thousands of people have been injured or made ill by never events. A never event occurs when medical workers are negligent, resulting in incidents that would have been easily preventable were it not for their substandard care. For instance, never events often occur during surgeries, such as incidents where surgeons have mistakenly left foreign objects inside the bodies of their patients.
Such an event should never happen because there are stringent policies and regulations in place in operating rooms to prevent it. Every item a surgeon uses during an operation is to be accounted for by his or her surgical assistants. A patient may not know an object has been left inside his or her body until days or weeks later when infection sets in.
Other common never events in Ohio and beyond include transfusing a patient with the wrong type blood, performing the wrong medical procedure or performing the correct procedure on the wrong patient. There are also medication errors and other types of issues. If a patient can show evidence that medical malpractice has caused his or her injuries, he or she may file a legal claim against those deemed responsible for damages. This type of litigation is typically challenging and highly stressful, which is why most injured patients allow experienced personal injury attorneys to act on their behalf in court.
