Her physician husband may have made a fatal error with a patient

8-6-2005 | IslamWeb

Question:

My husband is a doctor, he once made a surgery to patient, at the end of the surgery he asked the nurse as usual if she counted the tools and towels to make sure that nothing is inside the patient, she said yes. It turned out that there was one pc. of towel forgotten, the patient had another operation by another doctors, but she died. It was said that the second operation was not done as it should but no investigations was done, the hospital management transferred my husband only to cool the patient's relatives. What should we do?

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Answer:

All perfect praise be to Allaah, The Lord of the Worlds. I testify that there is none worthy of worship except Allaah, and that Muhammad is His slave and Messenger. We ask Allaah to exalt his mention as well as that of his family and all his companions.

 

Giving a ruling on a specific incident like this one requires looking at its circumstances with more details; therefore we cannot give a precise ruling on it. However, there are some general requirements according to which the doctor is held responsible or not, and these are mentioned in Fatwa: 87930.

Finally, we advise this doctor to take this case with all its details to a scholar where he lives and there is no harm if he shows to him the Fatwa that we referred to above.  

Allaah knows best.