Washington DC Anesthesia Mistake Lawyer

While most people assume that anesthesia mistakes and errors in judgement are only made by anesthesiologists, anesthesia mistakes are also made by many other medical practitioners such as nurses, and others who have anything to do with the surgery that the patient is being given anesthesia for during the operation. 

The primary anesthesia mistake that is made is improperly assessing the patent's health condition and special problems before giving the anesthesia. Another common mistake made is by failure to watch the patent's reaction to the anesthesia while undergoing the surgical procedure. There are many common anesthesia mistakes and most of them are due to incompetence in administering the anesthesia. 

Some of these anesthesia mistakes are obviously due to an incompetent medical practitioner: not properly assessing the amount of anesthesia that needs to be given, failure to discover before hand that the patient is allergic to anesthesia, administering the wrong medication, not monitoring the patent's vital signs, lack of training on oxygenation negative reactions, slowness in administering anesthesia.

The obvious problem with anesthesia mistakes is that the mistake might take the patent's life. A situation occurred in a hospital that hired temporary help to handle vacancies in their staff. There was a miscommunication in the type of anesthesia a woman was to be given, and she was given the wrong anesthesia. The woman died as a result of an incompetent anesthesiologist. Finally, some anesthesia mistakes happen because of some doctor's handwriting being so illegible that his charts are not read properly. 

If a patent's allergies were noted by one medical person who would be involved with the patent's surgery and actually documented, that documentation of the patent's allergy might not have been read by some other medical person involved with the patent's surgery. 

You could then conceivably be administered the wrong kind of anesthesia and suffer a heart attack or a stroke. Unfortunately, some anesthesia mistakes happen when a hospital surgical staff rushes to complete its list of surgeries and careless mistakes cost a patient his life. A proper history of the patient should be taken before surgery which should include such obvious important considerations like the weight of the person, past allergic reactions to anesthesia, what kind of surgery he will undergo, and the most obvious consideration, the age of the patient.