Medical error: From a legal framework to an approach based on surgical risk management

Abstract

The legal concept of medical error is focused on the liability of professionals and healthcare establishments in the event of patient harm. Encompassing medical hazard and loss of chance, this approach is aimed at determining indemnification for harm following a medical accident occurring in a patient. Risk management associated with an adverse event strives to prevent errors and to minimize their deleterious consequences. Search for medical accident avoidability is the main concept characterizing this approach. Analysis by feedback from operational experience allows professionals to anonymously and non-punitively learn from their mistakes, the key objective being to improve their practices. The objective of the present study was to consider medical or surgical error first in a legal framework and then from a risk management standpoint, thereby enabling the surgeon to better understand the specificities of these approaches with their different purposes and to expressly integrate them in his practice, in such a way as to promote patient and professional safety.