Proposal Essay
Avoiding Intricacies That Constitutes a Medical Malpractice
Medical malpractice can be defined as the professional negligence by a health care attendant or provider in which case the health care provided was unsatisfactory, substandard, and caused bodily or psychological harm, injury or death to a patient. In most cases, medical malpractice or negligence involves a medical error. The error will manifest in diagnosis, health management, medication dosage, treatment or aftercare. The error may result from acts of omission or a negligent act. Examples of hospital errors included: wrong dosage and medication, leaving foreign materials inside the patient's body after surgery, erroneous diagnosis, unnecessary and faulty operations, and poor aftercare on surgeries, among others
(Nordqvist).
Medical malpractices account to thousands of deaths annually in America. To be precise, statistics shows that diagnosis errors take up to 160,000 deaths in the U.S. Clearly, this is a matter of national concern to all the citizens of any society. This paper will focus on the undesired outcomes of a medical practice which are attributed to inadequacies on the part of the physician causing patients dissatisfaction that makes him/her pursue compensation for damages suffered. The paper will utilize a set of research questions that will form the basis of analysis as follows; what duties should a physicians play in attempts to curb medical malpractices? What is the role of the patient in reducing malpractices in health centers? What are the social and economic effects of healthcare misconducts?
The research is aimed at gathering information on the above subject as well as relating it to daily usage. It will give a more vivid picture of what has been taking places behind the scenes. The article is meant to deliver substantial information to citizens concerning the role they can play to curb the vice. In matters to do with health care, all humanity (inclusive of the medical practitioners) is a stakeholder. This warrants the need for heightened efforts to make our health centers deliver quality services to its recipients. This being the case, analyzing the whole of the stakeholders would proof cumbersome and a lot of assumptions made leading to
less accurate findings. For this reason, the research will target a few selected medical centers both private and private.
A quick review on the materials related to medical malpractices reveals the extent to which the vice has spread in the society. As mentioned in the outgoing section, alarming cases of malpractices are claiming more and more lives of patients and distressing others unnecessarily. The information contained herein will inform the reader why the article considers the deaths to be unnecessary. Moreover, this proposal will address the roles that each stakeholder is supposed to play to curb medical malpractices.
Multiple authors and researchers are of the opinion that something needs to be done to address the issue of malpractices evident in the health centers. Research done on different sections of this nation gives differing statistics on the number of ‘beneficiaries’ of the malpractices. An example is Hopkins research reported in BMJ quality and safety (2013) which places the death toll between 80,000 and 160,000 annually arising from diagnostic errors alone. In support of the above, Newman said that erroneous diagnosis is the biggest patient safety and medical malpractice problem in the United States. In reality, there are a lot more harm done by diagnostic errors than we imagined. The physicians are brought to task here enlightening them on a failure that results from their part. According to a Health Grades
Patient Safety in Hospitals Study, about 195,000 patients in the United States die each year from preventable in-hospital medical errors. The authors added that out of 37 million
Medicare hospitalizations from 2000 to 2002,
