by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

It's nobody's idea of a party to wake up from an operation and find out that the surgeon has amputated the wrong foot or erroneously removed a vital organ or left a scalpel in your lower abdomen.

Although the possibilities of such a calamity might seem remote, such incidents happen all the time. Some of the more recent jaw-dropping cases include those of Sheldon Millet, 21 who died being treated for a broken ankle. Jean-Sébastien Martel, 18, and Isabel Perreault, 28, both died in separate incidents being treated for broken legs - and the list goes on and on. In fact, medical mistakes end or mess up the lives of 10,000 Canadians a year - including 1,500 to 2,500 Quebecers, says Paul-André Busque, an administrator at the Blue Bonnets racetrack who developed an interest in the subject after his 54-year-old wife died from an overdose of medication administered after an operation for a broken hip. "The coroner said that if they had simply checked her vital signs she wouldn't have died," he says.

The path to justice for families or victims of those who suffer a medical goof-up, he believes, is awfully steep. "These people are discouraged, they don't know how to proceed, the administrative burden the system places on these people is enormously heavy. They're already physically and mentally exhausted from what they went through and then they're really taken to the limit," he says.

He charges that the province has done a lot more to defend the docs than to help their victims. "The Quebec government gives $15.5-million to doctors to pay their insurance but gives nothing to the victims of the profession," he says. "Even if these people are eventually compensated, no fault is ever put on those responsible. It all gets covered by the insurer and it's the taxpayer who pays for that. The medical people are never held responsible for these acts."

Since December 2002, provincial law obliges hospitals to divulge accidents but Busque notes that most still haven't assembled the required error management committees.

Last week, at a meeting of about 100 people at Blue Bonnets, Busque presided over the first-ever meeting of the Aid Fund for the Victims of Medical Mistakes (FAVEM). Since then, the phone has been ringing off the hook. "We're getting too many calls, we can't even handle them, so I've been referring them to a volunteer organization that gives information about the complaint process," he says (the number is 1-877-767-2227).

One of Busque's first efforts at reform is to empower the coroner. When a person dies due to a foul-up, a coroner inevitably offers recommendations on how such disasters could be henceforth avoided. But Busque notes that the wise counsel often doesn't change anybody's methods. "Why spend Quebec taxpayers' money for a coroner's report and then just ignore it? The coroner does his work and then it's ignored. The law must be changed to give the coroner's office much more power."