Part II – Wrong-Site Surgery - The Surgeon Doctor’s Clinic

Welcome to the world of Web 2.0. Most every business has a website for purposes of advertising what they do well. Surgical clinics are no exception. A surgeon friend of mine once stated, “Advertising for hospitals is similar to saying, ‘We have sharper needles.’” Funny statement but in some sense there’s a grain of truth to the boldness of claims made in medical advertising.

In the instances of medical clinic most have a statement describing about the clinic, the mission statement and the doctor’s philosophy.

Most medical clinic websites will provide the doctor’s biography, work and educational experience. Some will provide a description of their clinical experience. In the instance of a surgeon there should be a detailed description of where they learned the art of surgery.

So what should you do as a patient or as the attorney representing the patient who’s undergone a wrong-site surgery? First visit the website and become familiar with it. If you don’t know how to download an entire website using Adobe Acrobat then learn how. Take the tutorial and learn how to gather and preserve the website. Also download all of the forms offered online through the website.

If downloading the entire website isn’t practical then print every relevant page to a portable document format and save it to your electronic file. These Adobe pages will later be incorporated in your demand binder that will be copied to a compact disc or DVD and sent to Kinkos for printing. PDF files print much cleaner, sharper and in color. Also, the content is very important and may later prove critical to your case.  You’ll be surprised what’s there and how the claims being made in advertising get watered down the closer your client’s case gets to a trial date.

This is the end of today’s lesson. Follow tomorrow and we’ll discuss the surgical facility.