Top Seven Surgical Procedures for Medical Mistakes

The emergency room is never a place any of us want to visit, but most of us will see the inside of an emergency room at some point in our lives. Do you also know the leading reasons why? There are seven procedures that account for 80% of all emergency room trips. The study, published in JAMA Surgery, identified the following seven procedures:

• Partial Colectomy
• Small-bowel resection
• Cholecystectomy
• Operative management of peptic ulcer disease
• Removal of peritoneal adhesions
• Appendectomy
• Laparotomy

A couple of these may be familiar to some of you, but for the rest of us, this list is composed of procedures that are almost entirely related to the digestive system. Generally speaking, if they are opening your abdomen, there is a fair chance one of the above procedures will come into play. Beyond putting you into the emergency room, these procedures also account for the majority of complications, costs, and deaths. You should take this with a grain of salt; when a few procedures account for the majority of instances, they will also tend to have the most opportunities for complications.  Claims data served as the basis for the study and the claims could have been missing details, and also lacks information regarding patients who did not have an operation within two days of admittance.

If you or a loved one have had a brush with medical complications and need legal advice, do not hesitate to contact us at 202-296-0666 for legal consultation.