Furthermore, the trauma team did almost everything right from the head-to-toe examination to the simplest things like giving IV fluids. However, they forgot to ask one …show more content…
The first one is that not everything is how it seems. In the guy case, the trauma team thought that it is just a small gap in his abdomen and it's not a bad injury because he seemed to be okay at the moment. But it was not. Second, I should do every step and not miss the small thing like what the weapon was. Third, take good history which can help in saving patient's lives in a lot of times. It also should be reported by the EMT in the hand-off report. Last but not least, the trauma team should have reassessed the patient, one assessment is not enough. The author also discussed the idea of human fallibility that was written by the two philosophers Samuel Gorovitz and Alasdair Macintyre. They said that ignorance and ineptitude are the two main reasons why we fail. According to Gawande, ignorance means that we only have a partial understanding of the world and how it works. In other words, it's our unawareness or unfamiliarity with science or anything in the world that may cause our failures. This was the situation in the past when people did not have enough knowledge about cancer for instant.
However, nowadays science is more discovered. We have enough knowledge and a huge number of solutions and strategies but failure is still hunting us. We fail to apply knowledge in the right way and this how ineptitude is defined by …show more content…
The stab wound incident's core lessons have a lot in common with what I have learned so far. First thing is that not everything is how it seems. I learned to assess the patient initially and reassess him. Even if the patient looks okay at the moment, his condition might deteriorate. Second, I learned that I should assess the mechanism of injury, do every step and not miss the small thing like what the patient injured by. Third, take good history which can help in saving patient's lives in a lot of times. It should not only be taken but it also should be reported by the EMT in the hand-off report. Last but not least, I learned to make sure to follow what I was trained to do, like following the standing orders and contact the medical director in case of confusion or special situations. All of what things I have learned have not done by the trauma team on the stab wound incident and by the anesthesiologist in the potassium overdose story. All of these mistakes did not happen because of ignorance but because of ineptitude, situations complexity and