Surgical Errors

The November 2007 Annals of Surgery  has an interesting article on surgical errors.  The abstract of the article says that  the authors "analyzed 444 randomly sampled surgical malpractice claims from four liability insurers. Among 258 claims in which injuries due to error were detected, 52% (n = 133) involved technical errors."

They found that "[f]orty-nine percent of the technical errors caused permanent disability; an additional 16% resulted in death. Two-thirds (65%) of the technical errors were linked to manual error, 9% to errors in judgment, and 26% to both manual and judgment error. A minority of technical errors involved advanced procedures requiring special training ("index operations"; 16%), surgeons inexperienced with the task (14%), or poorly supervised residents (9%). The majority involved experienced surgeons (73%), and occurred in routine, rather than index, operations (84%). Patient-related complexities-including emergencies, difficult or unexpected anatomy, and previous surgery-contributed to 61% of technical errors, and technology or systems failures contributed to 21%."

So, what do they conclude?  "Most technical errors occur in routine operations with experienced surgeons, under conditions of increased patient complexity or systems failure. Commonly recommended interventions, including restricting high-complexity operations to experienced surgeons, additional training for inexperienced surgeons, and stricter supervision of trainees, are likely to address only a minority of technical errors. Surgical safety research should instead focus on improving decision-making and performance in routine operations for complex patients and circumstances."

I thought the "error in judgment" number was the fascinating.  After 26 years of work in this area of the law, I have heard everything blamed on error in judgment.

Find the article here.  Thanks to the DC Med Mal Blog for informing me about the article.