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"Never Events" Happen Every Day in U.S. Operating Rooms
Review of malpractice claims finds retained objects, wrong-site surgery happen 4,000 times a year.
Published:December 21, 2012
The numbers from the first study to calculate a national rate for "never events" are eye-popping. According to an analysis of national malpractice claims, U.S. surgeons leave foreign objects inside patients 39 times a week, perform the wrong procedure 20 times a week and operate on the wrong site 20 times a week.
Researchers from John Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Md., reporting online in the journal Surgery, estimate that 80,000 surgical never events - totally preventable surgical errors that should never happen - occurred in American hospitals between 1990 and 2010. Researchers used the National Practitioner Data Bank, a federal repository of medical malpractice claims, to identify malpractice settlements and judgments following such never events, including retained foreign bodies and wrong-site, -patient, and -procedure surgery. Malpractice payments for never events totaled $1.3 billion.
Interestingly, researchers found that some surgeons were repeat offenders. Of physicians named in a surgical never event claim, 12.4% were later named in at least 1 more such claim. The study found that increased payments were associated with severe patient outcomes and claims involving a physician with multiple malpractice reports.
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