10 Best Tennis Racquet For Heavy Topspin

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Surgery Mistakes - Slip-ups Are More Common Than You Previously Thought

The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations has tried asking doctors or patients to mark the correct site and verify the procedure beforehand.

You've probably heard of someone who had surgery...on the wrong body part, or even the wrong surgery entirely! We all hope that it won't happen to us. But how prevalent are the "oopses" these days?

According to an L.A. Times-Washington Post Service article, a study in the September issue of the Archives of Surgery reports that the problem may be 20 times more common than previously thought and that prevention efforts may be inadequate! The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health care Organizations and some physician and patient advocacy groups have tried to eliminate such errors by having doctors or patients - or both - mark the correct site or verify the procedure beforehand.

When four separate databases were used (including the federal National practitioner Data Bank, a repository of malpractice payments and disciplinary actions) two physicians, Samuel C. Seiden and Paul Barach, estimate that the wrong-site surgery occurs between 1,300 and 2,700 times a year in the United States! Whew! That's a lot of unhappy patients! When you consider the incredible number of surgeries done in 2005, the number of slip-ups pales by comparison, however if you are one of the people who had something removed unnecessarily, you probably aren't too impressed by the number of surgeries that went as planned.

Not that things haven't been tried to eliminate the mistakes. In 2004, the Joint Commission required hospital staff to take an operating room "time-out" to verify the patient's identity, confirm the procedure to be performed, and ensure that all needed equipment was present. But because the commission does not require reporting or investigation of surgery on the wrong site, it seems impossible to tell if the new policy is working very well or not.

Really bad mistakes include an (unidentified) health care system which had a policy of verification in place yet experienced 14 wrong-site cases between January, 2003 and June, 2004. Included was a patient whose sole functioning kidney was removed (!) and a stroke survivor who was supposed to have surgery for circumcision, but who lost both testicles instead! And both of these patients verbally verified the procedures beforehand.

Drs. Seiden and Barach have suggested that reporting of wrong-site surgical procedures should be mandatory, which would allow for a careful analysis of the cases to try to prevent such things from happening in the future. Other suggestions have included bar-coding to identify patients, and to encourage patients to verify the operation site and their identities, but only in addition to built-in verification procedures.

It makes you want to draw a big bulls eye with an indelible marker on the area awaiting surgery. Or Post-It notes in a trail with arrows to the right location. Fortunately., the mistakes are a very small percentage of the total number of surgeries done in the United States each year. There are so many done, for such a broad range of reasons, that I couldn't find one, all-encompassing estimated number as a grand total for last year. Somewhere out there is that number, and it must be a big one. If you are scheduled for surgery soon, at least the odds are in your favor that the right thing will be worked on!