Ethics of Surgical Complications

Defining surgical complications Whatever the place or period, surgical complications have been an inevitable part of surgical practice. It is not sur-prising, then, that studies on various aspects of surgical complications are plentiful. A PubMed search returned nearly 800 articles with the phrase ‘‘surgical complication’’ and its plural form in the title. However, despite the importance and prevalence of the matter, there is at present no agreed definition of a surgical complication [1]. Published definitions of the term range from the straightforward (‘‘any undesirable result of surgery’’) to the more elaborate [2, 3]. In this article, we propose to use the following definition, which, although unwieldy, captures more accurately the attributes of a surgical complication. A surgical complication is any undesirable, unin