Insights on Medical Errors

Reflection on Medical Error

“To err is human,” and the doctors are human themselves, proving that medical errors are inevitable. The Institute of Medicine released a publication that stated that 98,000 deaths were accounted for the medical errors each year, which were even greater than the road accidents (Bari, Khan & Rathore, 2016).

The Healthcare system is becoming more complex each day with the up-gradation of the technologies and new scientific methods with discoveries; even a simple method of administering the right medication involves several humans in the process (Jacob, 2017). This paper aims at elucidating a personal account of the medical error and how it affected the healthcare providers, patients, and their families.

The medical errors related to anesthesia are critical as 947 out of 1000 ICU cases have been reported due to anesthesia medication errors (Kothari et al., 2010). The mortality and morbidity of these errors are expected to be much higher as many cases are unreported due to reasons like variation in population data, clinical practice, repute damage for the hospital and the physician, method of reporting, data collection, and lacking the homogeneity for its definition.

I witnessed a personal experience within my family where my aunt was about to deliver her first baby through a cesarean operation, and the anesthesia doctor failed to administer the right amount of dosage to the mother that caused her blood pressure to drop quite low, posing a high health risk to the mother and the baby.

It was also known that the failure of the operating team to communicate with each other about the signs of danger related to the mother and baby caused significant difficulties in handling the baby and the mother efficiently since the blood pressure kept on dropping compared to the standard levels. When the nurse was seen coming in and out of the operation theater excessively, the family got anxious and asked the nurse on her third round out of the operation theatre. The nurse had to break the disturbing news that the mother’s blood pressure was not getting stable. The family was extremely upset and kept on praying. These showed signs that medical errors caused torment to the families of the affected ones as well.

After the strenuous struggle of the operating team, the mother’s blood pressure was made stable, but the baby was affected. The baby was kept in an incubator instantly. His oxygen level was fairly low; he had to be given supplemental oxygen through nasal equipment for several hours before being allowed for discharge. Due to the serious condition of the baby and the complications that the mother had to go through during her cesarean operation, they both had to stay at the hospital for two days. Both of them were kept under observation before the doctors were sure that they are normal and could go home.

The inside information of the actual problem that happened within the operation theatre, except for the nurse who told only about the low blood pressure levels of the mother and not the anesthesia medical errors of the general physician, was known to me through my supervisor as I had been an intern at the same hospital a few months ago. I had known the doctor personally and had been on good terms since then. It is widely known that many of the cases are underreported due to the defamation of the doctors and the outrage of the families whose kin are affected. Had the actual reason been known to my family, they would have been atrocious towards the general anesthetist and the surgeon as well.

On a national scale, the government has been striving to keep the rate of medical errors as minimal as possible through continuous and upgraded training that should be at par with the newly devised scientific approaches. Medical facilities in each city are prudently making efforts to report such medical errors since under or no reporting would not solve the medical intricacies they produce for the patients, doctors, and families. It is highly imperative to make a root-cause analysis in-depth to avoid future medical errors.

Despite professional practice and training, healthcare providers are prone to making errors, and mistakes become inevitable. Guidelines and best practices have existed for ages for avoiding these mistakes and guaranteeing patient safety; however, many cases still encountered medical errors, especially mentioned in the personal experience regarding anesthesia medical error. It is dire need of the time that, along with safety precautions, a safety culture should be adopted and practiced within the hospitals where doctors and physicians should be open to talk about mistakes (Glavin, 2010).

Though, it is not advised that the mistakes should be discussed with the patient or their families as their outrage would be inevitable; the errors should not be hidden and must be discussed with senior doctors so that cause and effect relationship of such complex occurrences that cause errors, or other reasons such as laziness of the doctor himself, tiredness or lack of sleep, etc. could be timely detected.