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Comment by fa17 | Hacker News Reader

Doctor. The idea of studying human body and saving lives fascinates me. Having said that, i think Docs should be more accountable, like for ex: they could screw up a surgery resulting in a loss of life and no one would even know about it, is something always scares me.

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> Having said that, i think Docs should be more accountable, like for ex: they could screw up a surgery resulting in a loss of life and no one would even know about it, is something always scares me.

I'm curious about where you got this idea. In the US (and I'd presume any other modern healthcare system) a patient dying in surgery leads to a full incident review.

I believe they're referring to a mandatory publication of these events or even all outcomes, linked/contingent with licensure.

AFAIK the incident reviews are protocols that physicians and administrators use as tools for teams to learn, not for patients to consider which physician to choose.

If you want people to be honest about their mistakes, they need to feel that doing so won't come back to bite them. The airline industry sets a great example in learning from failure to improve safety.

Given today's plentiful tech resources, it only makes sense to record video and audio of every surgery. These would be useful for accountability as well as refinement of technique and protocol. The added cost would be negligible.

Some people actually have trouble getting a risky surgery performed because surgeons don't want to screw up their stats. It's a very tricky problem to solve.

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