Korea

Danger to patients: medical mishaps ought to be sternly controlled

Keywords: Patients, Surgery

It is impossible to describe how anxious and fearful patients and their families feel when they are faced with operations. Patients’ lives are entirely dependent on the medical team conducting the surgery. Needless to say,to be successful, the medical team ought to know the patient’s condition and other details before carrying out operations.

In this regard, it is shocking to learn that a hospital in Taejon, associated with Konyang University, endangered the lives of two female patients in their 60s through a mix-up with their surgeries which were conducted simultaneously late last December. One of the patients was scheduled to have a part of her stomach removed because she was suffering from an early stage of stomach cancer. The other was to have an infected thyroid gland removed. However, the medical teams mixed up the operations; removing parts of the healthy stomach from one and the thyroid gland, which is in the neck, from the other. They later discovered their mistake, replaced the removed parts and carried out the originally planned surgeries.

More upsetting is the hospital’s attempt to conceal its mistake. The horrifying medical blunders would have been kept secret if the patients’families hadn’t revealed them in their anger over the hospital’s hesitation in taking appropriate steps to compensate them for the suffering caused by the mix-up.

No matter what the circumstances, the hospital’s mistake can’t be excused. The mistake could have been avoided if the medical teams had checked the names of the patients before they conducted the operations. The hospital staff acknowledged that they neglected their duty by placing the patients on the operation tables without checking the names written on their wristbands. The most unpardonable error is the medical teams’ failure to distinguish healthy organs from the infected ones. Nobody understands why the medical teams didn’t realize their mistakes until after the operations.

Even though it is too late, the health authorities ought to intervene in the grisly case and take stern punitive action against anyone responsible for the unnecessary surgeries that greatly heightened risks to the patients in light of their age. Some people even suggest that the hospital be shut down for committing what were borderline crimes and then trying to hide them.

In the meantime, as the case is regarded as the tip of the iceberg of medical mishaps, the government ought to strengthen its supervision of hospitals and clinics across the country for the safety of patients

For more information: www.times.hankooki.com