Physician recounts medical error to newspaper
Patient Safety Monitor Alert
September 5, 2007
A Florida surgeon told a newspaper about his experience making a medical error during an angioplasty procedure. His story was part of a (Sarasota) Herald-Tribune article on changing how errors are viewed in the state.
The article explained how the patient's difficulty in communicating, coupled with last-minute changes to the patient's orientation on the table and other oversights, led to the surgeon operating on the wrong leg to remove a blockage. He did find and remove a blockage in the incorrect leg before switching to the correct surgical site to remove three other blockages.
The state fined the physician $5,000, half the normal penalty for such an error. The case has some advocates asking Florida to reconsider its punitive-based system to one that encourages public reporting, which would make more information available to address errors in a systematic way.
