Surgical items, such as a sponge or an instrument, are mistakenly left inside patients about a dozen times a day, according to a USA TODAY report. Comments from Facebook:
My friend is a surgical nurse, and she says the whole surgical team, from doctor down to nurses, makes sure everything is removed before closing. Different hospitals, different procedures.
No one is perfect, not even doctors. People do have accidents. Have you never made a mistake in your job?
You have a number of people there, and they are paid to be perfect. My husband recently had emergency surgery and a hospital stay to follow. Total bill was hundreds of thousands of dollars. For that I expect perfection.
But because the people are lazy and do not do their jobs, bad things happen. There's no excuse.
It is not rocket science. I am a surgical tech.
Before the case begins and as the abdomen is starting to be closed, you do an instrument, sponge and needle count. If it is not correct, you go back in looking for the missing item. If it is correct, you do another count of needles and sponges as the skin is beginning to be closed. If not correct, you go back and find the missing item before the patient is allowed to wake up. If you can't find the missing item, you do an X-ray. Sponges and needles show up on X-ray.
It is unbelievable to me the number of times the nurse in USA TODAY's video stated it happened at the hospital she works at. Inexcusable. Like she said, one time is one time too many.
Lisa A Treacy
It's hard to believe that hospitals need tracking technology to prevent these errors. All those years of medical training, and doctors can't remember to clean up after themselves?
Letter to the editor:
No human activity that expects its practitioners to be perfect can succeed (" What surgeons leave behind costs some patients dearly").
NASA developed systems theory based on principles that were initially developed by industrial psychologists. The central tenet of this model is that when humans make errors, it is the system that needs to be corrected to make such errors much less likely. Most important, blame and punishment must be removed from the system because their presence strongly encourages practitioners to hide and thereby avoid blame and punishment for system failures.
Modern health care is permeated with a system in which blame and punishment are central principles. That is, individuals are blamed for failures of the entire system. Surgeons are not directly involved in counting surgical items; that is the job of other operating room personnel. Blaming and punishing surgeons for errors that occur in the system makes the problem worse.
The occurrence of medical errors is a very complex subject, but no more complex than the manufacturing of automobiles or airplanes. Until we universally adopt the principle that human error is unavoidable, and only by analyzing the system for failure without blame or punishment, these errors will continue.
When we seek to find out what went wrong and not who went wrong, then we will be able to make our health care system better for everyone.
Robert Solomon, M.D.; Great Neck, N.Y.