What is a Surgical Complication?

Excerpt

In preparing for a lecture on the ethics of surgical complications, it became apparent that confusion exists about the definition of a “surgical complication.” Is it, as one medical website states, “any undesirable result of surgery?” [1]. In the European Journal of Surgery, Veen et al. [2] provide a more elaborate definition: “every unwanted development in the illness of the patient or in the treatment of the patient’s illness that occurs in the clinic” [2]. An esteemed historian of science suggests yet another definition in a recent volume on surgical complications: “a complication, in any sphere of endeavour, is something out of the norm, and the product of extraneous and unexpected factors” [3]. Such is the discrepancy in definitions that Rampersaud et al. [4] declared in 2006 that “presently, there is no clear or consistent definition of a complication in the surgical literature.” …