You are in a colorless void. You no sense of time, memory or movement. The feeling of physical pain and hunger is no more.  There are no boundaries to it. It cannot be described by complex math formulas or a piece of writing. You have no clue that there is a hole in your stomach with tubes hooked up draining everything into a bottle on the floor. You have no understanding that your heart is being electronically pumped or that you’ve been on a ventilator for the past 6 days. The tubes are preventing you from making a single sound. All you know is that you will end. You’re not sure how or when or who “you” are.

“Medical error is defined as a preventable adverse effect of medical care whether or not evident or harmful to the patient.”(Murphy).  Medical errors can range from wrong prescriptions to mistakes in the surgical rooms. People believe that they need to focus on the causes of death that range among everyone, but no one is thinking that doctors are the reason people are dying. Medical errors are a cause of death that few people think about. 

In 2013, the deaths ranged from 210,000. In recent studies, it has shown that the deaths range from 250,000 to 440,000 (Shipherd). These numbers are the medical errors that get reported, there are many cases that get undetected or aren’t reported. Lots of these errors occur from the wrong medication, hospital-acquired infection, miss diagnoses, delay in treatment, follow up treatment gone wrong, and technical errors. These medical errors, for the most part, can be prevented. There are non-preventable errors that happen in the surgical room. Although, there are many things that people can do to make sure that they are staying as safe as possible with their health care provider. To ensure this, you can keep your start by always keeping your health care provider up to date on anything medical-related, as well as make sure that you are getting the right prescription by having the doctor or pharmacist relate the medical terms to your understanding. If you are going into surgery, make sure that you and your doctor(s) are on the same page about what is going on in the surgical room. Also, make sure that you know what the treatment is after surgery. 

Mistakes in the operating room are a big percent of the overall medical error deaths. Surgeons are getting stressed in the operating room. There was a captured picture of a surgeon's heart, and it showed that they have lots of short term stress. It showed that they get stressed in situations in the operating room when they hear an irregular noise or a negative thought is triggered. This makes the surgeons prone to making mistakes which can lead to mistakes like internal bleeding, ripped tissue or burns. (Lagasse). Any stress relieves practice could help the surgeons’ decrease in their mistakes which could help decrease the number of preventable medical errors. Even though stress can chance medical mistakes, other mistakes are from the surgeons not doing the surgery before or not being qualified to do the surgery. 

Many of these mistakes though are leading people to wonder what actual medical practice they have. There are instances that the surgeon has never done the surgery before, which is called incompetence. This is when surgeons do the surgery for the first time before or for one of the first times. This makes it hard for the surgeon to perform the task successfully. There is also insufficient planning. Insufficient planning is the step that happens prior to the actual surgery. Not reviewing the plans, planning for any complications that may show up, or even just preparing for the surgery, in general, will increase the chance of mistakes in the operation. In some cases, the doctors decide that there are steps within the surgery that can be skipped and they miss it because they think it is unnecessary. By not wanting to do the steps and taking shortcuts in the surgery and it can become very costly. There are also other things that can happen such as neglect (not looking into the cases),  poor communication, and fatigue, which is having the surgeons be tired while doing the surgery. (Withers). 

“An elderly woman went to the hospital after a severe fall with an obviously broken hand. Even though she repeatedly asked people to do something about it, she was ignored for 10 days. She was then discharged with a permanently bent and impaired hand” (Crisp, 152). This is an example of a medical error that happened to someone in the book. You can see here that there are medical errors of all sorts. It can range from people getting surgical medical related issues or it can be the people just not tending to you. I am going to use this in my essay because I think that it can really boost. It can show the different ways and give you more than one insight on the subject. I really like this quote because I was able to see that even though she asked a million times for help from people, they were not helping her. She ended up getting really hurt and was not attended for. 

My definition of a medical error is when the surgeon or the doctor loses focus on one part of the operation or patient, or there is a miscommunication and then it leads to death or a longer period of stay in the hospital. Unfortunately, due to medical error, my father was negatively affected. In the fall of 2018, he was sent into emergency surgery for an issue in his small intestine. This leads to the extraction of bacteria through the process of drainage in tubes. Due to him needing a drain, he had to keep draining this bacteria until it was “gone” in January when he went back in for the reversal surgery. During the surgery, the surgeon punctured a hole in the intestines which lead to him being sent into a state of septic shock within 48 hours. Septic shock is when a condition sometimes occurring in severe sepsis, in which the blood pressure falls and the organs of the body fail to receive sufficient oxygen. This means that he was unconscious and he was in a medically induced coma for many days. While being in this Coma, he was stationed in the ICU of the hospital. After coming out of the Coma, he was put into bed rest instead of trying to get him back into moving some sort of way. Due to no movement, his feet started to lose circulation in both feet, and that was when he was transferred to another hospital. 

There, they did many surgeries to keep him functioning and not start to lose him again. Doctors also did many surgeries to try and save his feet, but they ended up amputating half of his left foot and the toes on the right. Fast forward eight months, and he is now moving with a scooter to get around because he cannot use his left leg, and he has the bag back on. If the first surgeon successfully did his reversal surgery, he would not be in this state. The doctor who did this surgery had a technical error that was not noticeable, until 48 hours later. Although he did not die, this was a near-death experience with medical errors. These doctors had not seen anything like it, but yet still did surgery on him. Surgeons are creating too many technical errors in the operating room, and the patients are having a hard time recovering from it. The particular way that training a doctor is not working because there are mistakes like these that are being made in the operating room leading to these after-effects. I personally feel like doctors need to start focusing on one type of surgery in general, so they know everything about that and not vague things about all the different types of surgeries. There are lots of surgeons that are unable to really focus on the part of the surgery that they need to be really researching. The risks of surgery can change every day, and certain surgeries do change every day because of the new information that is being discovered. So, when general surgeons go into surgery thinking that it is an easy task, they can realize that there are many other parts throughout the surgery that they’re not qualified for and that ends up in other medical errors. 

“...the authors found that 21% to 66% were not well prepared for the operating room, were unable to demonstrate ownership of patient care, and could not operate for 30 unsupervised in a major procedure.” (Crisp, 15). This quote is important because it shows that doctors are unprepared for the surgeries that they go into. In my research paper, I talk about how when these surgeons are going into the surgeries unprepared, they are more prone to making mistakes. Many people out there are signing the papers saying that they have “faith” in the doctors that the surgery is going to be successful. The people are not understanding that some of the surgeons in the hospital think that they are prepared, but because they have not done the surgery before, or they have not done it in a while, they are not always thinking of the risks or researching the risks. This quote also explains how these surgeons are having a hard time operating in major surgeries and they end up not taking ownership of the patient if all goes bad. So, lots of the time surgeons are unable to get the successful surgery that they want, so they don’t add the medical document the things in the surgery that went bad. They also might be not taking all of the credit for what they did in the operating room that lead these people to deathly conditions. 

Medical errors are a topic that is not spread throughout the internet. Many topics are prioritized over this, but medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the United States. They can from not being tended on to a mistake in the operating room. People need to start thinking about how costly these errors are for everyone. More than 250,000 deaths are too much for mistakes. 

Works Cited

Crisp, Donna Helen. Anatomy of Medical Errors: The Patient in Room 2: a Nurse's Story of Surviving Preventable Medical Errors and Discovering the Truth. Indianapolis, Sigma Theta Tau International, 2017.

Gorski, David. Are medical errors really the third most common cause of death in the U.S.? (2019 edition). Science-Based Medicine, Digital Gravity Media, 4 Feb. 2019, sciencebasedmedicine.org/are-medical-errors-really-the-third-most-common-cause-of-death-in-the-u-s-2019-edition/. Accessed 23 Sept. 2019.

Lagasse, Jeff, editor. Surgeons under stress make more mistakes in the operating room, study finds. Health Care Finance, HIMSS Media, 18 Dec. 2018, www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/surgeons-under-stress-make-more-mistakes-operating-room-study-finds. Accessed 23 Sept. 2019.

Murphy, Micheal. "Medical Errors: Causes and Solutions." Medical Scribe Journal, 26 Aug. 2014, www.scribeamerica.com/blog/medical-errors-causes-solutions/. Accessed 22 Sept. 2019.

Sipherd, Ray. "The third-leading cause of death in US most doctors don't want you to know about." CNBC, 28 Feb. 2018, www.cnbc.com/2018/02/22/medical-errors-third-leading-cause-of-death-in-america.html. Accessed 22 Sept. 2019.

Withers, Shad. "Surgical Errors and Medical Malpractice." Nolo, www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/surgical-errors-medical-malpractice.html. Accessed 24 Sept. 2019.