What the data do suggest is that we do know a bit about which doctors are most likely to experience never events. They are, perhaps unsurprisingly, doctors who had already experienced malpractice claims. Younger doctors also had higher odds of settling malpractice claims for never events. Washington Post
A Study by Johns Hopkins Hospital , found that the Surgeons leave foreign objects such as a sponge or a towel inside a patient’s body after an operation 39 times a week, performs the wrong procedure on a patient 20 times a week and operates on the wrong body site 20 times a week..
This is related to US where the medical Norms are supposed to tight,
In India, it is non-existent.
Even if it is, it is a well-kept secret.
I have seen surgeons administering Anesthesia when the patient suffered a Lung related disease and could not stand a particular anesthetic for they never referred the History of the patient.
There are cases where a wrong part is operated upon..
The instance quoted in the article is peanuts for us in India.
.Patients in India or their relieves need to be more vigilant in Hospitals and should demand to know the Surgical Procedure, Anesthesia to be used, and check for any abnormality after the surgical procedure and react immediately without standing on form of Behavior or fear of reprimand by the Hospital or the doctor.
I have some posts where Doctors have forced a patient to undergo operations because he has to complete his monthly target in Surgery!
Story:
BACKGROUND
Risk factors for medical errors remain poorly understood. We performed a case–control study of retained foreign bodies in surgical patients in order to identify risk factors for this type of error.
METHODS
We reviewed the medical records associated with all claims or incident reports of a retained surgical sponge or instrument filed between 1985 and 2001 with a large malpractice insurer representing one third of the physicians in Massachusetts. For each case, we identified an average of four randomly selected controls who underwent the same type of operation during the same six-month period.
The researchers, reporting online in the journal Surgery, say they estimate that 80,000 of these so-called “never events” occurred in American hospitals between 1990 and 2010 – and believe their estimates are likely on the low side.
The findings – the first of their kind, it is believed – quantify the national rate of “never events,” occurrences for which there is universal professional agreement that they should never happen during surgery. Documenting the magnitude of the problem, the researchers say, is an important step in developing better systems to ensure never events live up to their name.
“There are mistakes in health care that are not preventable. Infection rates will likely never get down to zero even if everyone does everything right, for example,” says study leader Marty Makary, M.D., M.P.H., an associate professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “But the events we’ve estimated are totally preventable. This study highlights that we are nowhere near where we should be and there’s a lot of work to be done.”
For the study, Makary and his colleagues used the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB), a federal repository of medical malpractice claims, to identify malpractice judgments and out-of-court settlements related to retained-foreign-body (leaving a sponge or other object inside a patient), wrong-site, wrong-procedure and wrong-patient surgeries. They identified 9,744 paid malpractice judgments and claims over those 20 years, with payments totaling $1.3 billion. Death occurred in 6.6 percent of patients, permanent injury in 32.9 percent and temporary injury in 59.2 percent.”
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