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agate
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Joined: 17 May 2006
Posts: 5694
Location: Oregon
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 Posted: Sat Nov 13, 2010 3:00 pm Post subject: Surgical errors continue despite protocols |
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I'm not trying to scare people. I do think it's always a good idea not to have absolute faith in any member of the medical profession. Sometimes I find news items that underscore this point.
This was in the New York Times, October 19, 2010:
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Surgical Errors Continue Despite Protocols
By RONI CARYN RABIN
Despite a requirement that hospitals abide by a standard set of procedures to prevent surgical mistakes like operating on the wrong patient or the wrong body part, such errors continue to occur far too often, researchers are reporting.
In the worst case reported, a chest tube was inserted into the wrong lung — the healthy one — and it collapsed, killing the patient. In other cases, surgeons removed a healthy ovary, operated on the wrong side of the brain, fused the wrong vertebrae and did procedures on the wrong eye, knee, foot, elbow and hand.
The researchers’ study, which appears in Archives of Surgery, is drawn from an insurance database in Colorado that included 27,370 self-reported incidents from 6,000 physicians from 2002 to mid-2008. (Doctors in the insurance plan receive incentives for early reporting of adverse events.)
Surgeons reported performing 25 operations — including three prostatectomies — on the wrong patient, as well as 107 procedures on the wrong body part. The mix-ups often started in the internist’s office.
Past estimates suggested that such mistakes occurred once in every 110,000 procedures, but the paper’s lead author, Dr. Philip F. Stahel, said the incidence might not be so rare — and might even have increased.
“These data are shocking,” said Dr. Stahel, director of orthopedics at Denver Health Medical Center. “These are catastrophic events that are unacceptable. They have been termed a ‘never event’ — because they should never happen.”
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The article can be seen here. |
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