At work, a person is expected to be in accordance with the attributes of a successful employee. Employees are also expected to comply with the demands of the people around them, including their boss or managers, and most especially, the clients and customers. Not but not least, employees are also expected to be on their best performance to ensure great quality of work, and the pressure of being an employee who exudes great practices serves as recognition or acknowledgment, as well as the increase of prestige and authority. This is the reason why promotions happen.
The pressure would be greater if it is in a professional field, where it is a field with competitive and excellent professionals who constantly strive to improve their system of work and to improve their services for people who benefit from their line of work.
A perfect example would be in the medical field due to it being in demand for everyone since it is a necessity. Necessary in the sense that people are in need of proper healthcare services, medication, and a right to have access to medicine and the medical field can provide the said necessities to the people.
There are many ways that a medical health practitioner could offer their services. The first one is to prescribe medicine to the patients. Patients would go to the pharmacies or hospitals in order to know what kind of medicine should they buy for their medication. This is a necessity because it helps eradicate the ignorance of a person regarding the usage of drugs and to further educate them about the right dosage to avoid overdose.
Another common medical service that the medical field could offer is surgical practice. Surgical practices are done by surgeons inside an operating room. Added to this, surgeons actually do not work alone on the surgery because every surgery is composed of a few medical professionals with a specific type of task that were assigned to them such as ensuring that the patient is not experiencing any pain during the surgery which is why the doctor is providing painkillers or anesthesia to the patient. Another role is responsible for assisting a surgeon with the surgery. Assisting in a way that the doctor will help in passing tools to the surgeon, perhaps managing other types of machinery that can be used in the surgical process such as the suction for blood and other fluids, or they could also be the one to stitch the patient up once the surgery is over.
Surgeons are known to be as one of the professionals with the most excellent and highest levels of skills due to the competitive environment they experienced when they were still training for their specialization in which took them for more than a decade to finish. However, despite the vigorous and intense training they have gone through during their training years that helped hone them into one of the most competent professionals in the medical field, and was assigned a huge responsibility, do you think that in every single surgery these surgeons do are successful?
Do Surgeons Mess Up With Performing Surgery?
To answer the previous question, yes, surgeons do mess up? But how often?
According to some researches, the average amount a surgeon could make when performing surgery is around 39 errors or malpractice, in medical terms, in only just a week. These types of errors are also called “never events” because these are mistakes that should not happen in the first place due to how dangerous the risks are when a patient is a victim of these medical malpractices.
These never events examples are when a surgeon accidentally leaves an item inside the patient’s body such as surgical sponges, gauzes, or towels. Sometimes, surgeons also leave needles by accident.
Leaving foreign items inside a patient’s body is a pretty common occurrence in the operating room due to how some factors like the size of some surgical tools, a needle is extremely thin and small, it would be no wonder that there is a possibility that a surgeon could have accidentally dropped one while performing a surgery. Another factor is the material that a surgical time is made of. Take sponges and gauzes, for example, these two surgical items are extremely absorbent and they could soak the blood of the patient. But the catch or consequence to this is that the sponge would camouflage with the other organs or tissue inside the patient’s body due to how similar it looks with the amount of blood it has soaked. This is the reason why some surgeons tend to forget some foreign objects inside the patient’s body.
Due to the number of times this type of error occurred, complications arise on patients who became a victim of this. Since a patient has a right to fight for their right to proper healthcare, patients could sue the surgical practitioners who made medical malpractice on them so that they could get the compensation they deserve and for recovery purposes as well.
Because of that, medical professionals would want to ensure that the next time they deliver or perform a surgical operation, it would be of the best quality, and never repeat the mistake again. Due to the constant improvement of surgeons in line of awareness in the workplace, the number of cases regarding surgeons accidentally leaving some objects inside a patient’s body lessened in number.
The Bottomline:
Despite being honed and molded by the extensive and intense training before becoming a certified professional in any field a person is taking, one could not still avoid the unfortunate circumstances and make mistakes in their line of work because, at the end of the day, every professional, who is expected to deliver the best performance in the line of work makes mistakes as well.
The best thing a person could do is to try and redeem themselves and try to do better than last time in order to avoid and lessen any risks of errors that could affect not just the self but the others as well.
Sources:
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/254426#1
