Preventing Medical Mistakes
A patient can do a lot to prevent mistakes
in their medical care.
You generally can spend a lot more time
examining the situation than your over-worked
medical advisors can.
There are several basic strategies
to cut down mistakes overall:
- Get educated: Learning about your condition and its treatment
is the best way to prevent an error.
- Get involved: Be assertive about your right to be part of the decision
process for your medical care.
- Ask questions: Make sure you understand everything and ensure that you
have been told all your options.
- Tell your doctor everything: all symptoms (even if
you think it's unrelated), other prescription medications,
other over-the-counter medications,
other alternative treatments,
prior surgery, and so on.
Don't assume it's not important just because your doctor did not ask.
- Research past records: research the record of your doctor and hospital.
Find out how much experience they have with your condition.
Preventing surgery mistakes:
Although not all surgical risks can be avoided,
there are certain ways to reduce the risk of an error.
- Ask staff to wash hands
- Ask staff to wash gloves (or preferably change gloves): medical staff may wear gloves
to protect themselves, but not always remember to wash or change
the gloves to protect patients.
- Have an observer during the surgery
- Research the surgery record of your doctor
- Research the surgery record of the hospital
- Ask if your doctor will perform the entire operation
- Ask if there are options to surgery
Non-preventable medical mistakes:
Not all medical errors are preventable.
The entire medical industry has been trying to prevent and minimize them
for years, without enough success.
As a patient, you only have limited control over your health care.
For some situations, such as surgery, you are literally in
someone else's hands.
- Surgical slips: even the best doctors will sometimes make simple
mistakes in surgery.
Surgeons are human.
The only way to minimize this risk is to ensure
your surgeon has a good record.
- Lab test errors (false positives, false negatives): all laboratory
tests have known situations when they can be incorrect.
Some tests are more accurate than others, but all have a slight
risk of returning the wrong result.
It is difficult to avoid these small risks.
However, if your diagnosis does seem to rest strongly on
a particular test result, then perhaps it is worthwhile to repeat
the same test, or to ask your doctor if there is a second confirmatory test
that can be used.
- Adverse reaction to medication without previous history: for example, the only
way to know if you have a penicillin allergy is to have penicillin,
so it's not possible to avoid the reaction if you don't know
about it yet.
However, medical mistakes do occur when a patient has a known
allergy or intolerance and the doctor still prescribes the treatment,
either through oversight or lack of information about the patient's history.
» Next page: Medical diagnosis overview
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