What is a medical error?

Doctors must go through a tedious amount of training, education and testing to work in the profession. They have a very huge responsibility to every patient they treat. Mistakes are something that should never happen in the medical field, yet medical errors occur every day in Florida. You may even have been a victim yourself. Medical errors fall into several categories.

Forbes explains a medical error can be something as simple as doing something different than normally would happen. For example, the medical field has general plans of action that doctors should take when faced with a patient displaying certain symptoms. If you come in with a swollen and misshapen forearm and tell the doctor you fell, the normal course of action is to do an x-ray to check for a broken bone. If your doctor does not do this and does something else instead, it could delay proper treatment and cause you more pain. However, sometimes this type of error causes no harm to the patient.

Another type of error is an error of planning where the doctor sets a medical plan for you that is not right. It does not treat your issue or the outcome is not what should have happened.

An error of omission or commission is when a doctor makes a general mistake that leads to an unwanted outcome. This could be anything from not recognizing a symptom to making a bad diagnosis.

Finally, there is the error of execution. This is where your doctor tries to complete an action and does so incorrectly or makes an error along the way. In any event, the outcome is not what was initially intended to happen.

All of these medical errors occur because of human mistakes. They are also all preventable. This information is for education and is not legal advice.