Susan Lewis2 said:Personally, I’ve had quite extensive experience navigating the healthcare system because, unfortunately, I’ve struggled with my health since I was very young.
For many practitioners, I have nothing but praise—particularly regarding certain specialists, chief physicians, and truly elite experts. The level of care I received was top-tier, and I suspect I wouldn't have found anything superior even if I had traveled abroad (at least in my experience, as there were two specific instances where their expertise literally saved my life).
However, I find myself wondering if we should also address the darker side of things: the subset of doctors who lack a sense of duty and commit serious errors. What is the actual state of affairs here regarding accountability—whether it lies with the individual doctor, the hospital, or whoever is ultimately responsible when a patient suffers due to negligence?
If anyone has any insight into this, I would appreciate it if you could share.
I am thinking specifically of those harrowing cases that have dominated the news over the last year or two, where children were discharged prematurely because they were hastily misdiagnosed and simply didn't make it through the night. Or perhaps the mothers who clearly signaled they were experiencing complications, only to be ignored, leading to devastating outcomes (for instance, that recent case involving a woman who developed a severe infection postpartum; no one took her concerns seriously until she ended up in an emergency surgery at a major hospital in New York City, only for it to be revealed in her discharge papers that a surgical gauze had been left inside her, which was the root cause of all her suffering).
A while back, my own family dealt with a situation where it was later proven that someone lost vision in one eye because of a massive blunder during a routine procedure, yet predictably, there was never any compensation or even a simple apology.
Unless someone is exceptionally persistent, they might eventually secure some form of settlement—much like the high-profile cases we see involving people like Todoric—but the initial instinct in most institutions seems to be to cover up medical errors whenever they occur.
To reiterate, while I want to offer my sincere thanks to the many conscientious and honest physicians I know, I am genuinely curious about your thoughts on why the culture here makes it so rare for medical mistakes to be acknowledged, and why it is so seldom that anyone is held truly accountable.
What you mentioned is straight-up criminal. In an operating room, every single sponge and every piece of gauze placed in the surgical field must be accounted for. Likewise, at the end of a procedure, every scrap of gauze removed must be counted.
Why do these mistakes happen? Why are children being discharged from the ER? It’s simple. Doctors aren't machines. They are just human beings. There are far too many overnight shifts in the emergency departments. No one seems to check if a person can actually handle the strain. Usually, it's the younger staff who suffer most, working around the clock without being paid a dime extra for it. Those are essentially training shifts.
In every shift, there is a limited number of beds. The colleague ahead of you might not care whether they leave a bed free for you or not. You can show up for your shift only to find there isn't a single empty bed available. And then, you're just left to figure it out...
On the other hand, the senior staff is either sleeping or on call at home. If you admit a patient, they yell at you for taking them. If you turn a patient away, you could end up in the headlines. If you call them, they scream at you for half an hour about why you woke them up.
It is such an ungrateful profession, working day and night and not seeing a penny for it...😢