Outpatient Surgery Magazine, providing current information on Surgical Services, Surgical Facility Administration, Outpatient Surgery News and Trends, OR Excellence and more.
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MEDICAL MALPRACTICE 2 8 O U T P AT I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E O N L I N E | J U N E 2 0 1 4 Less wonderful, in the context of health care, is the fact that we can also pull up the ball game, menus, airfares and social media, which we can then use to gripe about having to go through another boring day in the OR. In other words, it's easy to blame the device, but the device isn't the problem. We are the problem. And our inability to control our impulses is something that plaintiffs' lawyers are itching to exploit. The people we see as patients, they see as victims and as jurors. When we jeopardize care or place lives in danger as a result of fool- ish, self-centered pursuits, verdicts will be swift and harsh. And rightly so. Through their eyes Put yourself in the patient's place. Recently a neurosurgeon from Denver was the target of a malpractice suit stemming from multiple phone calls — both business and personal — he took via a wireless headset while performing a procedure. The patient was left paralyzed after surgery — allegedly because the surgeon was distracted. An out- of-court settlement followed, limiting the flow of details, but rest assured the plaintiff's attorney had the phone and Internet records to prove his case. A Dallas anesthesiologist also recently failed to control those impulses. A cardiac patient he was monitoring for what should have been a routine AV node ablation was pronounced dead 10 hours into the case. The surgeon said the anesthesiologist failed to recognize that the patient's blood-oxygen level was severely compromised until well after the patient turned blue. Now it turns out that the anesthesi- ologist, after initially denying doing so, was texting and using Facebook during the case. He's likely to pay a steep price for having done so. Tragic outcomes like these are rare, but every practitioner who gives OSE_1406_part1_Layout 1 6/6/14 3:44 PM Page 28