“Grey’s Anatomy” Doctor Admits Mistakes

Dr. Atul Gawande says that like all of us doctors make mistakes. Gawande is the bestselling author whose book “Complications” inspired the television show “Grey’s Anatomy.” From an article in The Guardian

Gawande is a general surgeon at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. And he still makes mistakes. It’s this uncomfortable wound that he has opened up, first in Complications – his bestselling book that was shortlisted for the National Book prize in the US and became the inspiration for the TV series Grey’s Anatomy – and now in his follow-up, Better.

“What I’m interested in is failure,” he says, “as it’s the one area of medicine with which the professionals are often reluctant to engage because the stakes we are playing for are so high. We can fail by putting a decimal point in the wrong place and by not asking the right questions. If you ask any doctor when he or she last made a misdiagnosis, the truthful answer would always be in the last month. We get things wrong and we try to put them right. And, of course, we can fail with a slip of the hand. I once performed an emergency trachaeotomy in which I did everything wrong. I had the wrong knife, the wrong lights and I made the wrong incision. There was blood everywhere and the patient would have died if a colleague hadn’t stepped in to help. It was horrific.

If you or a loved one have been injured due to a medical mistake, please call Keating, O’Gara, Nedved & Peter at 888/234-0621 or fill out the contact form on this site. Your first consultation is free and we handle cases on a contingency fee basis.

Posted on June 15, 2007 in Medical Malpractice, Medication Errors
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Most Mistakes in Pediatric Chemotherapy Due to Human Errors in Administering and Dispensing

The Washington Post is reporting that:

“The vast majority of potentially harmful errors in chemotherapy for children with cancer do find their way to these young patients, a new study finds. And they are more often caused by dispensing or administration mistakes than by prescribing mix-ups, the researchers found.”

“In total,” the Post reports, “85 percent of these drug errors were not spotted until the child received the medication, according to a study led by Dr. Marlene Miller, associate professor of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore. These errors do not always cause harm to the child, the authors added, but they are always worrisome.”

As expected, human error accounts for the vast majority of these types of medical mistakes:

Surprisingly, prescribing errors accounted for just one in 10 cases. Most errors (48 percent) involved mistakes in administration, followed by errors in dispensing (30 percent). The most commonly cited types of error were mistakes in dose or quantity (23 percent), or time of administration (23 percent), followed by omission errors (that is, failing to deliver the drug at all, 14 percent) and improper administration technique or route (12 percent). By far the biggest cause of error was “performance deficit” — human error — at 41 percent.

If you or a loved one have been injured due to a medical error, please call Keating, O’Gara, Nedved & Peter at 888/234-0621 or fill out the contact form on this site. Your first consultation is free and we handle cases on a contingency fee basis.

Posted on June 1, 2007 in Medical Malpractice, Medication Errors
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