When Doctor Make Mistakes Atul Gawande Summary

Medical error is the third leading cause of death in the US, right behind heart disease and cancer. More than 200,000 people die annually as a result of diagnostic mistakes and negligence by healthcare professionals (Washingtonpost, 2016). In the healthcare industry, even the smallest mistakes and oversight could lead to severe consequences for both the patient and professionals. A healthcare professional would be held liable for any discrepancies that causes harm. The following case will analyze the ethical issue and negligence that lead to the death of an elderly woman.

Atul Gawande in his article “When the Doctor Makes Mistakes” exposes the mystery, uncertainty and fallibility of medicine in true stories that involve real patients. In a society where attorneys protect hospitals and physicians from zealous trials from clients following medical errors, doctors make mistakes is a testimony that Gawande a representative of other doctors speak openly about failures within the medical fields. In this article, Gawande exposes those errors with an intention of showing the entire society and specifically those within the medicine field that when errors are hidden, learning is squelched and those within the system are provided with an opportunity to continue committing the same errors. What you find when you critically analyse Gawande, “When Doctors Make Mistakes essay is how messy and uncertain medicine turns out to be. Throughout the entire article you experience the havoc within the medicine field as the inexperienced doctor misapplies a central line in a patient.

This paper is about the Case of Jacob and his diseased leg. Clinical negligence is one the main causes that led to the infection of Jacobs’s leg. It later resulted in his life being altered due to the fact that it prolonged his healing process because of a mistake that his own physician had made. The key component of integrity and honesty wasn’t exercised in this situation because of the lack of maintaining high moral and ethical conducts when treating Jacob. Due to this negligence, the consequences will be affected by both parties in which will result in taking it to the next level by taking Dr. M to court. This case should be treated as a civil action law suit because a wrongful act was committed. The use of clinical protocols helps healthcare professionals establish appropriate treatments and care for the patients.

This article is prospective and it is analytic. It is based on factual approaches obtained from articles and books. It is based on the statistics obtained from data about the medical error in the

"Johns Hopkins patient safety experts have calculated that more than 250,000 deaths per year are due to medical error…" (John Hopkins Medicine). This soaring number has caused medical errors to become the third leading cause of death in the United States. For many people, medicine seems foreign and unknown. People who have lost loved ones due to medical error desperately look for a reason, and many times that blame falls upon doctors. Media has put a negative connotation on doctors as well, causing their reputation to plummet whenever a hospital procedure turns badly. A renown surgeon and author, Atul Gawande, uses his knowledge and experience to give people a new perspective on medicine. In the article "When Doctors Make Mistakes," Gawande uses rhetorical appeals: ethos, pathos, and logos to prove the need for a change in the medical systems and procedures. He analyzes how the public looks at doctors, giving a new perspective to enlighten the reader that even the best doctors can make mistakes.

1. Dr. Gawande explains that in his training as a surgeon, he has struggled with the fear of not being able to fix a problem for a patient, even when he knows the odds are not good. If you were Dr. Gawande’s patient, what would you like him to know about your hopes for how he would handle a difficult situation like this?

Blendon, R. DesRoches, C. Brodie, M., Benson, J. Rosen, A., & Schneider, A. (2002). Views of practicing physicians and the public on medical errors. New England Journal of Medicine. 347, 1933-1940.

As described by Dr. Atul Gawande in his book Complications, medicine “is an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge… fallible individuals” making medicine different from other scientific fields

When assessing whether a no fault regime is better than a negligence rule in dealing with the causes and consequences of medical error, it would seem prudent to first understand the meaning of the term “medical error”. Liang defines medical error as ‘a mistake, inadvertent occurrence, or unintended event in health-care delivery which may, or may not, result in patient injury’ (2000, p.542). The consequence of these errors (or adverse events) that lead to patient injury, and the method by which we determine and administer compensation for such injuries, has been the source of heated debate amongst scholars in recent

In the medical field, precision is of the utmost importance when it comes to successfully ensuring that the job is done. Even the slightest mistake can be lethal, making communication vital in the medical field. A group of doctors and nurses must communicate and act like a single unit to complete the procedure. In “When Doctors Make Mistake”, the author, Atul Gawande, recalls a case where his team worked on a specific crash victim and the breathing tube could not fit in the trachea. Due to a lack of communication, one of the staff members tried to force the tube down the trachea causing more damage. In the essay, Gawande assesses the situation and agrees with his team to bring in a specialist to solve the

In”Overkill”, Atul Gawande, General Surgeon, talks us through an act of habit where doctors are over doing many practices, in a more precise description overkilling. It may even we seen as a follow-up of a previous article he wrote, the Cost Conundrum, where covers half of what is written in this article, which includes medical care, health costs and possibly an ill-fated motivation towards patient care. Gawande, gives us many examples of the miss happenings in the health care profession, further categorized as over testing, over diagnosis, and even over treatment. Though he might have not expressed so in extent, he is consistent with including a patient, Mrs. E throughout the article. Mrs. E, is the perfect example of what I will further

Nothing is perfect in this world. The mistake is inevitable, whether it be at school or in a workplace, one will always be able to find error nestled somewhere in the system. Because of its inevitability, an error is also very prominent in science, specifically in medicine.

The book explains that vast majority of errors occur due to good doctors trying to do the right thing but being unable to reach the goal since the system is fragmented. The authors include many instances of medical error, responses from patients, families, and healthcare professional, and the steps taken to improve the performance and reinvent the health care system. Throughout the book, heroic role of many leaders of healthcare professionals, scientists, and academic professionals are presented.

In the health care system, a multitude of errors occurs on a daily basis. Doctors, nurses, orderly’s, etc., everyone in health care settings has responsibilities that warrant careful attention. This was exhibited in the case study titled ‘An Extended Stay’. In this case study, we are introduced to a middle-aged man in his 60s named Mr. Stanley Londborg. He presented with several health conditions, including a seizure disorder, hypertension (also known as high blood pressure), and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). Londborg was no stranger to the hospital and was known fairly well by faculty members. Londborg paid a visit to the Emergency Room at the hospital complaining of wheezing and breathing complications. The physician that examined Mr. Londborg yielded his symptoms as an acute worsening of

Doctors have had a significant influence on society for several years. It is part of every doctor’s role to help the community. Without doctors diseases would be more common and almost impossible to get rid of. A lot more people would die from easily treatable or curable diseases. Doctors save lives. They can prescribe medications that change life for the better while some have to perform risky operations on injured patients. When faced with difficulties, they have to make vital decisions to help patients. Sometimes doctors have to work under extreme pressure. Every day someone has to depend on a doctor to enhance his or her life by curing ailments. Even without a cure, doctors can make ailments bearable. Medical professionalism has been around for thousands of years and is still significant in today’s society. Doctors can also aid patients by helping them learn about diseases. By educating patients on prevention, disease, and treatment, [doctors] empower them to include scientific thought in key decisions that affect their own care (Bokoch 16). Patients can use this information to prevent diseases from returning. Anyone can see that doctors have an important role in the community. A doctor’s main roles in society are to improve the health of the public, control outbreaks of disease, and to lengthen the lives of patients.