Medical errors and their consequences for human life and health

Abstract

Health security of patients is an issue of paramount importance for the medical profession. More and more often, a patient receives help from a therapeutic team and not only from a doctor or a nurse, a paramedic or a physiotherapist. Hence, it is the duty of the whole team to act in a way that will not cause damage to the patient. It is not unimportant that health care nowadays is more and more complicated and specialized. Therefore, it is more and more important to properly assign tasks to individual members of the therapeutic team, with clearly defined roles and duties for individual members and effective interpersonal relations within the team and communication with the patient. An analysis of court decisions confirms that medical errors are often the result of ignorance, disrespect for legal rules and principles of the professional ethics code. Also significant is incorrect work organization which manifests itself, among other things, in the shortage of medical workers with specific qualifications, lack of diagnostic equipment or lack of competent persons to operate them, lack of basic or specialist tools and materials necessary for a proper therapeutic process consistent with the current medical knowledge. Of course, routine, hurry, lack of patience and inquisitiveness are disastrous, as is “taking short cuts”, which in reality should never take place in the medical profession, but they do and result, more importantly, in the patient’s well-being being moved to the background. That is why it is so important to report and monitor the occurrence of medical errors, analysing the causes of their occurrence and taking steps preventing their occurrence in the future.