Minnesota hospitals have struggled for years to eliminate so-called wrong-site surgeries such as the one that occurred last week when a Methodist Hospital surgeon accidentally removed a healthy kidney from a patient with kidney cancer. But just as soon as they think they’ve made progress, they find another gap in their safety protocols. In this case, the mistake happened because weeks before the patient was rolled into the surgery suite, the surgeon marked the wrong kidney as cancerous in the medical record. Patient safety experts say they are just beginning to realize that correcting such upstream mistakes in medical records will be critically important in eliminating wrong-site surgeries. But those fixes will be far more complicated and difficult to implement than safety protocols that primarily focus on operating rooms just before surgery. In the wake of the tragic error that resulted in leaving a cancerous kidney in the patient, Methodist has again refined its procedures, officials said. To prevent that kind of thing from happening again, as of Monday surgical teams at Methodist are required to review all medical images, such as X-rays, right before surgery begins. It will be yet another item on their last-minute safety checklist.
Excerpt taken from a Star Tribune article.
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