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Surgical Calamities on Rise
The above headline appeared on the December 6, 2001 issues of the
online MSNBC and the Washington Post. According to the Post story author
David Brown, "The number of surgical calamities in which a doctor
operates on the wrong part of a patient's body,
and occasionally on the wrong patient, appears to be increasing."
This information is according to the organization that accredits U.S.
hospitals. The president of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of
Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) reports that the number of
"wrong-site surgery" has risen from 16 in 1998 to 58 in 2001
including 11 in one month alone.
There is a controversy according to the Commission as to whether or not
this report accurately reflects an increase in these problems or just an
increase in reporting of such mishaps. If this increase is due to
more frequent reporting it would suggest that the problem has been worse
than expected for a longer period of time. “I think it’s
real,” said Dennis S. O’Leary, a physician who heads JCAHO, which
accredits about 95 percent of the hospital beds in the United States.
“If you look at the trend line, you see an increase in every single
year” since 1995. He goes on to say, “People are busy and patients are
being put to sleep before there is an opportunity to verify who the
patient is, what procedure is going to be performed and on what site.”
The report revealed that the mistakes include such things as operations
on the wrong finger, replacement of the wrong hip joint, fusion of the
wrong spinal disk, cataract removal from the wrong eye and biopsy of the
wrong side of the brain. JCAHO’s “sentinel event alert” report
included three categories of mistake: operations on the wrong body part
(76 percent of cases), operations on the wrong patient (13 percent) and
the wrong operation on the right patient (11 percent).
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