Doctors Make Mistakes

Sunday, June 21st, 2015

Airline pilot Martin Bromiley’s wife died during routine surgery to fix a deviated septum that was causing sinus trouble, and he assumed that the next step would be an investigation:

“You get an independent team in. You investigate. You learn.” When he asked the head of the intensive-care unit about this, the doctor shook his head. “That’s not how we do things in the health service. Not unless somebody complains or sues.”

This doctor was privately sympathetic to Bromiley’s question, however. Shortly after Elaine’s death, he got in touch with Bromiley to say that he had asked a friend of his, Professor Michael Harmer, an eminent anaesthetist, if he would be prepared to lead an investigation. Harmer had said yes. After Bromiley gained the hospital’s consent, Harmer set to work, interviewing everyone involved, from the consultants to the nursing team.

[...]

The truth was that Elaine had died at the hands of highly accomplished, technically proficient doctors with 60 years of experience between them, in a fine, well-equipped modern hospital, because of a simple error.

[...]

Doctors make mistakes. A woman undergoing surgery for an ectopic pregnancy had the wrong tube removed, rendering her infertile. Another had her Fallopian tube removed instead of her appendix. A cardiac operation was performed on the wrong patient. Some 69 patients left surgery with needles, swabs or, in one case, a glove left inside them. These are just some of the incidents that occurred in English hospitals in the six months between April and September 2013.

[...]

The National Audit Office estimates that there may be 34,000 deaths annually as a result of patient safety incidents. When he was medical director, Liam Donaldson warned that the chances of dying as a result of a clinical error in hospital are 33,000 times higher than dying in an air crash. This isn’t a problem peculiar to our health-care system. In the United States, errors are estimated to be the third most common cause of deaths in health care, after cancer and heart disease. Globally, there is a one-in-ten chance that, owing to preventable mistakes or oversights, a patient will leave a hospital in a worse state than when she entered it.

[...]

Within two minutes of Elaine Bromiley’s operation beginning, the anaesthetic consultant realised that the patient’s airway had collapsed, hindering her supply of oxygen. After repeatedly trying and failing to ventilate the airway, he issued a call for help. An ENT surgeon answered it, as did another senior anaesthetist. The three consultants struggled to get a tube down Elaine’s throat, a procedure known as intubation, but encountered a mysterious blockage. So they tried again.

“Can’t ventilate, can’t intubate” is a recognised emergency in anaesthetic practice, for which there are published guidelines. The first instruction in one version of the guidelines is this: “Do not waste time trying to intubate when the priority is oxygenation.” Deprived of oxygen, our brains soon find it hard to function, our hearts to beat: ten minutes is about the longest we can suffer such a shortage before irreversible damage is done. The recommended solution is to carry out a form of tracheotomy, puncturing the windpipe to allow air in. Do not waste time trying to intubate.

Twenty minutes after Elaine’s airway collapsed, the doctors were still trying to get a tube down her throat. The monitors indicated that her brain was starved of oxygen and her heart had slowed to a dangerously low rate. Her face was blue. Her arms periodically shot up to her face, a sign that brain tissue is being irritated. Yet the doctors ploughed on. After 25 minutes, they had finally intubated their patient. But that was too late for Elaine.

If the severity of Elaine’s condition in those crucial minutes wasn’t registered by the doctors, it was noticed by others in the room. The nurses saw Elaine’s erratic breathing; the blueness of her face; the swings in her blood pressure; the lowness of her oxygen levels and the convulsions of her body. They later said that they had been surprised when the doctors didn’t attempt to gain access to the trachea, but felt unable to broach the subject. Not directly, anyway: one nurse located a tracheotomy set and presented it to the doctors, who didn’t even acknowledge her. Another nurse phoned the intensive-care unit and told them to prepare a bed immediately. When she informed the doctors of her action they looked at her, she said later, as if she was overreacting.

Reading this, you may be incredulous and angry that the doctors could have been so stupid, or so careless. But when the person closest to this event, Martin Bromiley, read Harmer’s report, he responded very differently. His main sensation wasn’t shock, or fury. It was recognition.

Any pilot knows that smart people can make dumb mistakes that get people killed.

Comments

  1. Slumlord says:

    Amen.

    I’ve seen medical mistakes happen by people who are thoroughly competent and altruistic. What was probably not mentioned here is that the Doctors would have been devastated by the outcome. Several of my colleagues have left medicine as a result of tragedies which were not necessarily their fault. Sometimes shit happens.

    The public always wants a scalp though and the ambulances chasers are always happy to oblige.

Leave a Reply