Iatrogenic complications in surgery. Five years' experience in general and vascular surgery in a university hospital

Advances in medicine that have led to more sophisticated methods of diagnosing, treating and monitoring patients take an ever increasing toll in iatrogenic complications. It may be argued that the net effect is an improvement in care, but it is self-evident that minimizing iatrogenic complications will increase the benefit to the patients of the ever increasing complex methods of treatment. Iatrogenic complications tend to be sporadic and varied in nature, and are difficult to study as a group. Psychological and medicolegal problems add to this difficulty. However, if the incidence of iatrogenic complications is to be decreased, a concerted effort has to be made to study them. This report deals with such an effort.