Medical Mistakes Unfortunate Reality

Alison Young recently reported in the AJC on some alarming medical mistakes in Atlanta area hospitals.  She mentions a surgical team at Northside Hospital removing two breasts on a patient instead of the one she consented to, a surgeon drilling into the wrong side of a patient's head at Altanta Medical Center, and doctors performing circumcisions on the wrong babies at Wellstar Kennestone Hospital and Cartersville Medical Center.  She offers a few tips to protect yourself such as talking to your doctors to be sure you agree, in advance, what procedures will be performed, reading consent forms and other paperwork carefully, having a designated advocate to help you ask and answer any questions, insisting your doctor marks body parts before surgery, and encouraging the seemingly endless barrage of questions from nurses, doctors, and other staff. 

Unfortunately, these steps cannot prevent all instances of medical error.  And, as many victims of such medical negligence find out, there is often no  practical  recourse available.  Most instances of medical negligence and error result in damages too  small to  justify the costs of litigation. Although assuredly , any incidence of medical malpractice that causes physical injury is  all too  real for those  that experience it.  In Georgia, you must be able to prove damage to  file a medical malpractice suit.  The process is lengthy and expensive and unfortunately smaller damages often make   cases economically unfeasible for both the attorney and the victim.  The best protection the  medical industry has  to prevent frivilous litigation and insubstantial claims is the  victim's  lawyer's contingency fee  contract.  This fee agreement allows attorneys and victims to pursue cases they might otherwise be unable to pursue .  Few people can afford to pay a lawyer hundreds of dollars per hour for hundreds of hours and for all of the hyper expensive litigation costs.   A  competent lawyer cannot take every meritorious case  unless it will likely result in a  substantial financial recovery.  Medical negligence victims find out too late that the system is simply not designed to  catch, correct and compensate for the routine errors that occur every day in Georgia hospitals.

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