A surgeon is responsible for keeping operating room staff in line

Each year across the United States, doctors perform millions of surgical procedures. Many of those take place in outpatient facilities while others require patients to spend the night at their facilities. While in some cases, just a doctor and their nurse will be in the operating room, in other cases there will be a team of medical professionals, each responsible for carrying out tasks.

Surgical technicians and nurses

A surgical technician wears many hats in the operating room. They are typically the person who brings a patient into the area where their procedure is going to be performed. They're responsible for fetching additional surgical tools or supplies when they're needed. They're also the ones who sterilize surgical tools before and after the procedure.

It's the surgical technician's responsibility to document the entire surgery, hand necessary tools to the surgeon and to ensure that the surgical field is always kept clean.

Nurses perform many of the same responsibilities that the surgical technicians do but may become more involved in assisting the surgeon with the actual surgery. They're often called upon to clamp off something on a patient or to even stitch them up.

Nurse anesthetists and anesthesiologists

Both of these are responsible for sedating patients before a surgery, monitoring them throughout it and then bringing them out of it once it's finished.

Surgeons

The person actually responsible for performing an operation, making life and death decisions about the patient's care and otherwise calling all the shots in the surgical suite is the surgeon. They're also the person that everyone is supposed to be responsive to and who they rely on to guide them if any concerns arise while the procedure is being performed.

When a patient suffers an unexpected injury from a botched surgical procedure, they tend to sue their surgeon for their suspected negligence. Cases do get filed against nurses, surgical technicians and their employer though. In each of these cases, this happens when they fail to uphold a certain standard of care.

Determining whether a member of your medical team was negligent takes someone with a keen understanding of what doctors typically do to be able to determine if they did something wrong. A Tucson medical malpractice attorney that's backed by a team of professionals that have an inside understanding of the health care system is who you'll want to be an advocate for your interests.