Many surgical malpractice cases don't turn on the operation itself · they turn on what happened in the minutes and hours after, in the post-anesthesia care unit. That's where deterioration is caught or missed.
The high-risk window
Recovery from anesthesia and sedation is a fragile period. Airway compromise, oversedation, bleeding, and hemodynamic changes often appear here first · and the record should show that someone was watching for them.
What the record should show
Vital-sign frequency, sedation scoring, airway management, and documented discharge criteria all leave a trail. A gap in monitoring or a premature discharge from recovery can be the heart of a case.
What a perioperative nurse sees
Having worked pre-op, intra-op, and PACU in ambulatory surgery, We know what safe recovery monitoring looks like and where the documentation belongs · so We can tell when a standard step is genuinely missing, not just unrecorded.