Surgical never events: Those sound sobering, don't they?

 Posted on December 23, 2020 in Medical Malpractice

We note a truism concerning the medical industry in a recent Kaiser Hafezi blog post: "The direct results of negligently delivered care are widespread and frequently devastating for victims and their loved ones."

One particular category of negligence merits special attention from medical malpractice law firms. That is the realm of so-called "never events."

The term sounds ominous, doesn't it?

As well it should. One recently issued overview of the subject matter from a U.S. federal agency succinctly described never events as "particularly shocking medical errors that should never occur."

Empirical evidence reveals (thankfully) that such mistakes - which occur primarily during surgeries - are not an industry commonplace. After all, millions of successful operations are carried out daily across the country.

Still, and expressed in aggregate numbers, the bottom line with never events can't be disguised as anything less than troublingly adverse. Reportedly, more than 4,000 such outcomes occur annually across the United States. That averages to nearly 11 every single day of the year.

And when they occur, these never events are often deadly. A leading medical commission stresses that more than 70% of never events - things like wrong-site and wrong-patient surgery, wrong procedure, contaminated drugs and devices, foreign objects retained in patients' bodies and gross medication error - yield fatal outcomes.

The flat reality surrounding never events is that they simply don't occur absent provider negligence.

Kaiser Hafezi attorneys collectively command decades of on-point and results-driven experience in the medical malpractice realm. The firm's proven effectiveness is well established by many maximum-compensation awards it has secured for injury victims and their loved ones over many years.

We welcome contacts from individuals having questions or concerns regarding the quality of received medical care, and the opportunity to secure meaningful legal recoveries for malpractice victims.