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Outcome data from both the medical and the surgical literature have linked good outcomes with experience, on the part of both hospitals and individual physicians. The obverse has been widely assumed as well — that bad outcomes stem largely from physician inexperience. “Not the case,” says this study.
Researchers reviewed records of 133 closed malpractice claims that reflected injuries caused by 140 surgical errors. Most were manual errors (91%), were made by attending surgeons alone (69%) or with trainees (27%), and occurred during routine low-complexity operations (84%) that were performed on a nonemergent basis (83%); only 9% were exclusively knowledge or judgment errors. Experienced surgeons were responsible for 68% of errors made during …