Malpractice is clearly a huge issue in the medical field, and after reading the NPR article in the prompt, I now see it is far more prevalent than I believed it to be. The older sister of a close friend of mine survived serious malpractice which caused very heavy blood loss during surgery. She is still dealing with the consequences of that doctor’s mistake. I hoped that this was not a common occurrence, but the estimates range from 98,000 to 440,000 a year according to the article.
The first step to fixing this issue should be to get the numbers recorded properly. The second should be working for better accountability measures or more strict hiring/screening processes. The doctor which made a mistake in my example above had left a previous hospital for similar reasons, these types of things should not be allowed to happen. One would expect hospitals to avoid doctors like this at all costs, but he must’ve slipped through the cracks somehow.
