An important milestone in Jordan’s medical history occurred yesterday. The father of a kid called Mutasem won a malpractice suit which he filed in 1999, after his son was put under the knife for hernia repair in a public hospital and emerged with a damaged-dead penis. The amount of the compensation was the biggest in Jordan’s medical history: 281,000 JD. The name of the doctor who operated on the kid was undisclosed.
I say good for Jordan. We can’t always boast about our medical expertise and about the quality of services we provide to Jordanians and Arabs alike, although most of this talk is valid only for private or military hospitals. We have to acknowledge our mistakes and when we do that, we will have credibility and we will be responsible for improving this important sector.
When my late aunt was rushed to a public hospital in Zarqa, she was still alive. Her good neighbor who was with her told me that she was still alive but the medics/nurses at the hospital were so slow in attending to her, and she eventually passed away. Thinking that she could have still been with us today had they reacted quicker is painful, to say the least.
An interesting bit in the article I linked to says that in Jordan we do NOT have a clear “medical responsibility” law, which means that the errors made since the dawn of medical practice in Jordan have gone mostly unaccounted for, the patients or their families have not been compensated, and no legal action was taken against the doctors or nurses.
وأوضح الحديدي أن قانون المسؤولية الطبية موجود على السطح ويحتاج للتوافق بين نقابة الأطباء ووزارة الصحة والمستشفيات الخاصة والجهات التي تمثل المريض ومنظمات المجتمع المدني لوضع قانون يضمن المساءلة الطبية للطبيب وضمان حقوق المريض بصورة عادلة وغير جائرة لأي طرف منهم.
وبين الحديدي أن غياب هذا القانون وعدم البت فيه منذ عام 2003 سيخلق فوضى في الاتجاهين أي اتجاه تزايد الأخطاء الطبية من جهة وتغول التعويضات في حال عدم إيجاد سقف وحد لها من جهة ثانيةن لتكون في حدود المنطق والمعقول وهذا سيحدث في حال غياب التشريع الواضح للأخطاء الطبية
Another interesting bit in the article is where it says that it is upon the patient to prove a medical error existed in their treatment. Very well, but in the case I cited above, it took the man NINE years to prove that a hernia surgery left his son basically incompetent. How is it possible that a case would take that long when the damage is so severe and so obvious? Also, there were many many cases where doctors left towels or scissors inside patients’ guts. How would the patient know unless they get sick and get opened up again?
Additionally, most patients who resort to public hospitals probably cannot afford to hire lawyers or to get legal assistance to prove that there have been medical complications beyond the scope of their treatment. I suppose that when they feel that they have been treated unjustly, some of them, or their families, resort to violence and beat up the doctors or nurses. Then we make a big fuss about it.
This is really a milestone!!
Thanks for bringing us the good news</p>
281k? that’s it? i say they got off easy, its a very small price to pay for ruining the kid’s life :\
I hope his medical license was confiscated as well! He sure doesn’t deserve to keep his medical record clean and go on to accidentally chop other kids’ penises.
It’s definitely a great step to start watching health care workers and holding them responsible for any malpractice or neglect towards patients, but one should expect the price of health care to shoot up very very quickly to cover for malpractice insurances (Neither the doctor nor the hospital will be paying for the 281,000 Jds)</p>
Hareega, I hadn’t thought of that actually. Why should the people pay for doctors’ mistakes?
Because the doctor cannot pay the 281,000 JDs himself! The hospital can’t pay for that either. </p>
<p>There are complication, expected complication of any surgical or meical procedure. If someone gets pneumonia -lung infection- he’ll probably die if he’s not treated, so I would give him an antibiotic to save his life. There is a small chance that this antibioitcs can totally destroy his liver or cause a fatal inflammation of the colon that will kill him in 24 hours, but I had to give that antibotic. I killed him by giving him the antibiotic but it would have been wrong if I hadn’t given it to him.</p>
<p>the truth is that every surgery (nose job, liposuction, tonsils removal, cataract surgery, knee/hip surgeries) can kill you, and every medicine you take including pain killers can kill you or cause major dysfunction of an organ system in your body. Doctors and nurses should be sued if there was neglect or if they have caused an unexpected complication of a surgical procedure. What’s happening in the US now is that doctors and hospitals are being sued for doing the right thing, for complication that are expected from drugs or surgeries. </p>
<p>Definitely that poor boy’s father deserves that compensation, but I’m afraid that in the future we’ll have some of the absurd lawsuits that people end up winning just by getting good lawyers. All doctors in the US have maplractise insurances and they pay a lot of money for that, so they have to raise the prices of medical interventions to cover for it. Hospitals also raised their fees to cover for these malpractce insurances. Not only that, but doctors indluding me are ordering very extensive unnecessary tests which are often very very expesnive to cover their butts in case a lawyer asked later "why didn’t you order that test". Who’s paying for these tests? Everyone else through health insurances and taxes….etc </p>
Very interesting perspective, Hareega. Is it possible that there is no other way to raise the money needed for compensation in case of errors? Can the law perhaps limit cases to obvious mistakes, like losing a towel in someone’s guts or castrating a boy by accident?<br /><br />Or have the patients sign something before their treatment informing them of the possible consequences, EXCLUDING whatever mistakes the doctors might individually make.<br /><br /><br />
Patients still sign all these documents and they can still sue. In the US they always sign these papers which, by the way, are very crippling to medcial care. Sometimes I spend more than half an hour trying to get a consent for a very simple procedure that is very simple because the patient is unconscious and I need to talk to his son who is vacationing in Hawaii and have another physician as a witness on the phone at 2 in the morning. But even if we get that doucemtn that doesn’t protect doctors or the patients. Lawyers always find their way into sueing hospitals and doctors and I lost all my respect to them. the law cdefines what’s an acceptable complication and what’s not but in reality lawyers win a lot of cases that should not have been won. </p>
<p>for example a pilot wanted a lasik for vision corrction. He was told that there’s a 1% risk of his vision actually getting worse afterwards. He signed the papers that he understood that. He had the lasik and his vision got worse and he ended up losing his job as a pilot. He sued the hospital (not the doctor) and won FOUR million US dollars. Who’s paying the 4 million? Not the hospital but the insurance company does, and the insurance company compensates for that by letting hundreds of thousnads of its customers pay higher health insurance rates. </p>