Doctors and nurses will make mistakes from time to time. Most of those do not result in a patient suffering serious harm, but a percentage of them do. Some of these that are particularly shocking are known in the medical profession as never events.
A never event is something that should never happen. The reason for this is not that medical staff can be relied upon never to make a mistake on a particular issue. It is more that, provided the proper policies and procedures are in place, these sorts of highly consequential mistakes should be caught before they result in harm.
Of course, as with policies and procedures anywhere, they do not always get implemented or followed as they should be. In such cases, the patient who was harmed, or their family if need be, may have a case for claiming medical malpractice.
Examples of these errors
As of September 2024, there are 29 never events listed by the National Quality Forum, which are subdivided into seven categories outlined below with an example from each:
- Surgical or invasive procedural events – e.g., wrong-site surgery
- Product or device events – e.g., death or serious injury due to contaminated drugs
- Patient protection events – e.g., a patient committing suicide in hospital
- Care management events – e.g., the mother dying in a low-risk birth
- Environmental events – e.g., a harmful gas being given to a patient instead of oxygen
- Radiologic events – e.g., death or serious injury due to metallic objects during an MRI scan
- Potential criminal events – e.g., sexual abuse of a patient while in medical care
Anyone affected by a never event may want experienced legal guidance to hold those responsible for such an egregious error.