When Doctors Get It Wrong
We’re only human
I remember one particular patient I looked after back when I first started as a doctor. It was on a specialty ward but we were used to having an overspill of “general medical” patients when the hospital was under pressure.
This patient had a long extended admission which can sometimes happen in hospital. People come in for one thing, then we find something else, or they become even more unwell due to the environment they’re in.
It was one thing after another. Every time we tried to fix one problem, something else would happen. Days turned into weeks then into months.
Eventually, it became clear that their condition was deteriorating. They were meant to have an operation but that couldn’t happen because the surgeons felt it’d be unsafe to go ahead and so we were left to manage them medically.
We got to a point where we could see that our efforts were not working and it appeared to us that there wasn’t much more we could do especially without surgery. At some point, we needed to make a decision between aggressively trialing different interventions or slowing down and keeping them comfortable. We finally came to a decision that the latter was the kinder option.
It’s a difficult decision to make and the line isn’t always clear. I didn’t understand…
