Surgical procedures can be highly invasive and can leave individuals with long periods of recovery. In some cases, Illinois residents who undergo surgery must also expect to go through rehabilitation before they can be considered fully healed from their ailments. Therefore, when a person decides that surgery is the best course of medical action for their health needs, it is likely that they have carefully weighed the benefits and risks of undergoing their procedure.
In many cases a person will, with time, find that their surgical procedure left them in a better position of health than they were in before the operation took place. However, from time to time surgeons and surgical staff members are negligent and patients suffer harm due to medical malpractice. During surgery, there are a number of mistakes that medical practitioners can make and one of the most serious is a wrong-site surgery.
A wrong-site surgery is one in which a doctor performs the correct surgery on a patient, but on the wrong part of their body. An example of a wrong-site surgery might be a doctor removing a patient’s left kidney when, in reality, the patient needed their right kidney removed in order to mend their health.
A wrong-site surgery subjects a patient to an unneeded procedure and leaves them still suffering from the initial ailment that led them down the path to surgery in the first place. These preventable but, unfortunately, common incidents leave patients with pain, suffering and financial losses as they attempt to figure out how to heal their bodies and pay their bills. Wrong-site surgeries are a form of medical malpractice and victims of these erroneous procedures may be able to seek compensation through personal injury legal claims.