Greedy Trial Lawyer
Should You Have Your Surgery In PA or Just Forget The Whole Thing?
Category: The Latest Baddest
The new state motto in Pennsylvania may be "Surgical Mistakes R Us", if the official state report is accurate.
In Pa., 175 surgical mistakes in 30 months
In one case, doctors removed a patient's healthy thyroid after a laboratory mix-up led to an incorrect cancer diagnosis.In another, a neurosurgeon halted a procedure after making an incision on the wrong side of the patient's head.
In yet another, a surgeon inserted a needle into a patient's right knee before realizing that the operation was planned for the other leg.
Those surgical misadventures are examples of the 175 errors made by hospitals and surgery centers in Pennsylvania, according to a report released Tuesday from the state's Patient Safety Authority. The survey, the first of its kind, covered the 2 1/2 years that ended Dec. 31.
Though rare, "wrong-site" surgeries are among the most sensational medical errors because they are so clearly avoidable. But the problems persist despite more than a decade of national efforts to stop them.
"Every other day in Pennsylvania we have a report of a wrong-site surgery being caught either before or after the start of the operation," said Stan Smullens, vice chair of the safety authority.
In 83 reported cases, the procedure was completed before the mistake was detected.
The report examined four surgical errors: the wrong side, the wrong body part, the wrong procedure, and the wrong patient. Nearly a third of the errors and near-misses occurred on legs, a quarter on the head and neck region, and a fifth around the groin.
National estimates of the wrong-site surgeries range from one in 10,000 operations to one in 113,000.
From philly.com
The frightening thing about the report is that it only deals with four types of surgical errors. Anyone care to look into anesthesia errors, instruments and sponges left behind, careless surgical techniques, unnecessary surgery or post-op screw-ups?
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