California Surgical Error Attorney

When you prepare for surgery, you hand over your complete safety to a medical team. You expect to wake up on the path to healing. It is a terrifying realization when you find out that the operation went wrong. The sense of relief you should feel is instead replaced by frustration and pain over a mistake in the operating room.

Surgical errors are a form of medical malpractice. Medical malpractice occurs when a healthcare provider, such as a doctor, nurse, surgeon, or hospital, fails to provide medical treatment that meets the accepted standard of care, resulting in harm to the patient. If you underwent surgery and experienced harm, you may have reason to bring a lawsuit against your healthcare provider.

Medical malpractice cases are complex. When a surgical error occurs, and you or your loved one is left to deal with the aftermath, you may not know who to turn to or what to do next. If you were injured because of a surgical mistake, a California surgical error lawyer can help you understand whether you have a medical malpractice claim

At Hodes Milman, we have spent more than 30 years standing up for people harmed by medical negligence across California. If you're ready to talk, call us at (949) 640-8222 or fill out our online form for a free, confidential consultation, or keep reading to learn more about surgical error claims.

"Hodes Milman was exceptional in advocating for our family and obtaining a substantial award for my brother! My brother had a stroke, causing hemiparalysis on the right side of his body and aphasia/apraxia as a result of medical malpractice related to a surgery performed on him. ‍

I can't begin to tell you how grateful we are to Dan! Although no amount of money can make up for this catastrophic event, having the resources now does enable him to have a better quality of life, as well as help us to care for him more adequately, hiring caregivers, obtaining specialized or modified equipment, and therapies. Needless to say, the process itself was complicated, but throughout the entire case, the team thoroughly explained every step of the process, putting my mind at ease. This team not only fought for us but did so in a compassionate manner. They understood our concerns and needs and were able to make that argument on our behalf. 

I strongly recommend this law firm and without a doubt can say that you are in great hands with these two! They have forever changed our lives for the better!”

- Joyce D. | Client

When Is a Surgical Error Considered Malpractice?

A surgical error is a preventable mistake that happens during an operation. Every medical procedure comes with known, acceptable risks. For example, mild bleeding or expected scarring are normal parts of recovery. A surgical error goes far beyond these normal risks. It happens because a doctor or medical team acted carelessly or failed to follow basic safety steps.

These mistakes violate the medical standard of care. This standard is the level of safe, competent care that any reasonable doctor would provide under the exact same conditions. When a professional falls below this line and harms you, the law calls it negligence.

Common Causes of Surgical Injuries Our Team Can Investigate

Operating rooms are fast-moving environments, but that is never an excuse for carelessness. Most surgical mistakes are completely preventable and stem from basic breakdowns in communication, system procedures, or focus. The most common causes we see include:

• Pre-Surgery Planning Failures: A surgical team might fail to review your medical history, overlook dangerous drug allergies, or fail to have the right medical tools ready and working properly before the incision is made.
• Bad Communication: Misunderstandings between surgeons, outside specialists, nurses, and technicians can lead to critical mistakes, like using the wrong medication dose or misidentifying a patient.
• Wrong Patient or Wrong Procedure: In deep lapses of attention, a medical team may fail to go through basic identification protocols. This leads to devastating instances where a doctor performs the wrong operation or treats the entirely wrong patient.
• Fatigue and Long Hours: Surgeons work grueling shifts. Extreme exhaustion can slow down their reaction times and cloud their judgment during delicate procedures.
• Incompetence or Lack of Skill: A surgeon might attempt a complex technique they have not been properly trained to perform, or they may step completely outside the boundaries of their medical specialty.
• Unqualified Personnel: When a critical task is handed off to medical residents, students, or assistants who do not have the experience required to perform them safely without direct supervision.
• Abandoning the Patient: A surgeon's job does not end when the stitches are put in. If a surgeon leaves the hospital too early or fails to stay close by to monitor your recovery, they can completely miss immediate, life-threatening complications.
• Inattention and Poor Monitoring: During an operation, the team must watch your vital signs like a hawk. When a medical team becomes distracted, they miss early warning signs until severe, permanent damage has already occurred.
• Substance Abuse: Sadly, some medical mistakes occur because a healthcare worker is impaired by drugs or alcohol while on duty.
• Haste: Rushing through an operation to save time often leads to skipped safety checklists and cut corners.
• Equipment and Technical Failures: When hospitals fail to check their gear, or when doctors use the equipment incorrectly, the technology meant to help you can cause severe internal injuries.

Financial Compensation Available in a California Surgical Errors Lawsuit

Surgical errors can result in devastating consequences for patients and their families. When medical professionals make mistakes or are negligent during surgery, the repercussions can be life-altering and far-reaching. From minor errors with manageable outcomes to catastrophic mistakes resulting in permanent disabilities, the impact of surgical errors can vary widely.

For patients, the physical and emotional toll of experiencing a surgical error can be severe. They may endure prolonged pain and suffering and require additional surgeries or medical treatments to correct the mistake. They may face uncertainty about their future health and well-being.

Financial compensation awarded in a surgical error lawsuit is meant to make up for the harm and losses you have experienced due to the surgical error. Some types of financial compensation a California surgical error attorney may recover for you include:

• Compensation for corrective treatments and medical expenses: Surgical errors may create the need for additional surgeries or treatments to correct the initial error (revision surgery). A lawsuit can help provide you with the funds necessary to pay for your future treatments, hospitalizations, medications, or rehabilitation.
• Pain and suffering: Pain and suffering financial awards are meant to compensate the individual for the emotional hardship they have experienced due to the surgical error. These types of awards are difficult to obtain. A California surgical errors attorney can help you seek compensation for any mental hardship you may have suffered.
• Loss of future income and lost wages: A surgical error injury may change your ability to work. Some injuries are severe enough that the individual is not able to work at all. Financial compensation can be awarded for past and future lost wages or income lost due to the inability to work.
• Punitive awards: Punitive awards may be awarded in cases involving extreme negligence or intentional misconduct on the part of the healthcare provider or facility. Punitive awards are meant to punish the wrongdoer and deter similar conduct in the future. Punitive awards are not available in every jurisdiction, so it is important to talk to an attorney before filing any type of legal action.

In some tragic cases, a surgical error may cause a wrongful death. If a family member has died due to a surgical error, you may be able to bring a wrongful death lawsuit. A wrongful death lawsuit is a legal action brought by the surviving family members or representatives of a deceased person.

Wrongful death lawsuits seek to hold responsible parties accountable for their actions and recover compensation for the losses and damages resulting from the death of their loved one. 

These losses may include financial support, companionship, guidance, and other forms of support that the deceased person would have provided if they were still alive.

Our capability to secure life-changing results is proven by our track record in highly complex surgical cases. For example, our team represented three patients who developed severe surgical site infections after a hospital permitted an orthopedic surgeon known to be colonized with MSSA to operate. After pushing through 25 depositions and filing motions for punitive damages, our team held the hospital and medical group fully accountable, securing a $12.35 million settlement to resolve the cases.

In another complex surgical procedure, our attorneys stood by a 51-year-old woman who suffered a devastating stroke after a medical team unappreciatively perforated an artery with a guidewire during an intracerebral aneurysm coiling and stent procedure. We fought to secure the recovery she needed to face her neurological injuries, resolving the case at mediation for $6 million.

What the Data Shows About Hiring a Lawyer

The compensation awarded in a surgical error lawsuit depends on several factors, including the severity of the injury, the extent of the damages suffered, and the evidence presented to support the claim. An experienced surgical error or medical malpractice attorney can help evaluate your case accurately and pursue appropriate compensation for your losses and injuries.

Taking on a hospital system alone can leave you at a major disadvantage. However, a Martindale-Nolo study looked closely at how legal representation changes injury outcomes. The numbers reveal that having an attorney dramatically changes your chances of success:

• Nearly Double the Success Rate: 91% of injury victims who hired a lawyer recovered money, compared to just 51% of those who went it alone.
• Over 4 Times More Recovery: People with a dedicated attorney secured a much higher average settlement of $77,600, while unrepresented individuals walked away with an average payout of only $17,600.

Even after accounting for standard legal fees, hiring a skilled advocate routinely puts significantly more recovery into your pockets to cover your ongoing care.

Medical malpractice lawsuits, including surgical error lawsuits, can be both emotionally and legally complicated. An experienced attorney can pursue justice while you focus on your health.

Contact the California surgical malpractice attorneys at Hodes Milman online or by calling our offices at (949) 640-8222. We are dedicated to making sure that your case receives the care and attention needed to give you a better chance of success.

Common Mistakes Handled by a California Surgical Errors Lawyer

Surgical errors may be more common than one might think. A recent study published by The National Library of Medicine reports that nearly 4,000 surgical errors occur each year. The far-reaching effects of surgical errors underscore the importance of ensuring patient safety and holding medical professionals accountable for their actions.

Some types of surgical errors include:

• Operating on the wrong body part
• Performing a completely wrong or unnecessary procedure due to a chart mix-up
• Leaving surgical instruments, tools, or sponges inside the patient, requiring a second surgery to remove them
• "Ghost Surgery," which happens when a different, less-experienced doctor performs the operation without your knowledge while you are under anesthesia
• Overlapping or concurrent surgeries, where a single surgeon splits their attention between two operating rooms at the same time
• A doctor performing a complex procedure that is completely outside their trained scope of expertise
• Damaging a medical device or implant
• Improper monitoring of a patient’s vital signs, like oxygen or heart rate, during surgery
• Causing permanent damage to nerves or slicing nearby healthy blood vessels and organs
• Severe post-operative infections caused by unsterilized hospital equipment
• Anesthesia errors

Many people feel hesitant to take legal action against a doctor or a hospital. But bringing a medical malpractice claim is about much more than your own recovery. It is a powerful way to shed light on dangerous medical habits. When hospitals are forced to face the consequences of a surgical mistake, they are forced to change. By standing up and holding negligent medical teams accountable, your voice can help rewrite safety rules, protect future patients, and inspire vital, statewide or even nationwide change to prevent these errors from ever happening to another family.

If a surgical mistake has affected you, let us help you turn your pain into purpose. Contact a California surgical errors attorney at Hodes Milman today by calling (949) 640-8222 or by filling out our online form for a free, confidential consultation. We are ready to stand with you to make healthcare safer for everyone.

Who Is Liable in a California Surgical Errors Lawsuit?

A major part of any malpractice claim is pinpointing exactly who caused the injury. Multiple people or institutions can share the blame for a single surgery gone wrong. Because an operation involves an entire network of professionals and equipment, liability can extend outside the operating room itself. 

Depending on the facts of your case, liable parties may include:

• The Lead Surgeon: For making direct cutting errors, severing nerves, or choosing the wrong surgical path. 
• The Anesthesiologist: For giving the wrong mix of medication, failing to review your medical history for drug interactions, or failing to track your oxygen and heart rate levels.
• Attending Nurses and Surgical Technicians: For miscounting sponges, mixing up charts, failing to properly sterilize tools, or failing to report warning signs during or right after the operation.
• The Hospital or Surgical Facility: For hiring unqualified staff, keeping dangerous schedules, or failing to keep surgical areas clean and sanitary.
• Medical Device and Equipment Manufacturers: If a defective product causes your injury, the company that manufactured that equipment can be held liable for product liability.
• Preoperative and Postoperative Care Providers: If a doctor fails to properly check your health history before surgery, or if a postoperative nurse or doctor fails to give correct recovery instructions and ignores clear signs of a serious infection or internal bleeding, they can be held accountable for your injuries.

How Your California Surgical Error Lawyer Proves Negligence

Doctors and medical insurance groups fight surgical claims aggressively. To build a winning case, your legal team must establish four essential pillars:

1. Duty of Care: We prove that a doctor-patient relationship existed, meaning the medical team had a legal obligation to keep you safe.
2. Breach of Duty: We show that the medical provider fell below the accepted standard of care by making a careless mistake.
3. Causation: We must directly link that specific mistake to your new physical injuries, proving your health issues did not come from an old medical condition.
4. Damages: We document the real physical, emotional, and financial losses you face because of the injury.

Proving these steps requires independent medical experts who do the same work. Our firm works with respected medical professionals across California to review your files and testify about exactly what went wrong.

California Surgical Error Data & Recent News

State records show that basic tracking failures happen across California every year.

To understand how often these mistakes happen, we can look at a comprehensive study published in JAMA Network Open. Researchers analyzed 142 serious, completely preventable surgical mistakes, known as "never events", reported directly to the California Department of Public Health (CDPH). The state data breaks down into these specific types of errors:

• Retained Foreign Objects (Left-Behind Items): 94 cases, accounting for 66.2% of all reported surgical errors.
• Wrong-Site or Wrong-Patient Surgery: 22 cases, accounting for 15.5% of all reported surgical errors.
• Surgical Burns: 11 cases, accounting for 7.7% of all reported surgical errors.
• Other Serious Mistakes (including equipment failure, falls, and insufficient surgeon presence): 15 cases, accounting for 10.6% of all reported surgical errors.

Key Findings from the California Department of Public Health Data

The details of this state-wide study reveal exactly why these medical errors are so dangerous for patients and their families:

• What Objects Are Left Inside Patients? The study found that left-behind items ranged from small gauze sponges and towels to large metal instruments like Kocher clamps. Specifically, 60.6% of these items were sponges, towels, or gauze. These materials absorb bodily fluids and hide inside the body, causing severe infections, agonizing pain, and toxic reactions.
• 67.6% Required Additional Surgery: 96 out of the 142 patients had to go right back under the knife for a second, unexpected surgery just to fix the medical team's initial mistake. 
• Hospital Volume Matters: The data showed that hospitals where these errors took place had a massive average annual volume of 9,203 surgeries, compared to just 3,251 surgeries at safer hospitals. This suggests that overcrowded, fast-moving medical centers may be rushing through patient safety checks to keep up with high demands.
• Regulators Demand Strict Changes: Because these mistakes are so severe, state regulators mandated an average of 13 corrective actions per incident. Over 90% of those state orders focused directly on strictly monitoring policy adherence, showing that staff simply failing to follow existing safety checklists is the root cause of the problem.
• Severe Harm Occurs: While most patients survived the initial mistake, these surgical never events routinely resulted in permanent disabilities or, in the most tragic cases, wrongful death.

Why Hire a California Surgical Error Lawyer at Hodes Milman

The medical malpractice attorneys at Hodes Milman have spent years litigating surgical error cases across California. Our founding partner, Dan Hodes, has focused on medical malpractice for nearly 40 years, recovering over $35 million for his clients in a single year.

When the system fails you, we fight back. Hodes Milman has helped people harmed by medical negligence get results that give them control, clarity, and a chance to move forward. We handle every detail, challenge every obstacle, and fight relentlessly for justice, so you can concentrate entirely on your physical healing.

Contact our team today online or by calling us at (949) 640-8222.

Proudly Serving California Residents