When Surgery Goes Wrong: Your Rights After a Surgical Error in NSW
Elective surgery carries risk. Every patient who consents to an operation accepts that complications can occur — infection, bleeding, adverse reactions, slow healing. But there is a category of surgical outcome that sits beyond the ordinary risks of medicine: the surgical error. The instrument left inside the body. The procedure performed on the wrong site. The nerve severed when it should have been spared. The anaesthetic dose that should have been reviewed. These are not the inherent risks of surgery. They are departures from the standard of care — and in NSW, they can give rise to a medical negligence claim.