Surgeries are intricate medical procedures that involve professionals accessing organs, bones or other internal parts of the human body. Surgical treatments can be highly effective options for people with a variety of different medical challenges. Unfortunately, they also come with a significant number of medical risks.
Surgeries can result in infection. People may have adverse reactions to anesthesia. There are also risks associated with mistakes made by the healthcare professional performing the operation. Some of those mistakes are so egregious that professionals refer to them as never events. They are mistakes that should never happen if surgeons and their support staff follow best practices.
Retained foreign bodies are a common surgical never event. Dozens of times each week, people come out of surgery with items left behind in their bodies. What are health care professionals most likely to leave behind when performing a surgery?
Surgical tools are the main concern
While mainstream media may like to dramatize stories of surgeons dropping wristwatches or other unrelated items into an incision, such cases are relatively rare. Frequently, retained foreign objects left behind after surgery were tools used to help perform the surgery.
Research analyzing reports from procedures where patients retained foreign objects indicates that the top item left behind after a procedure is a sponge. Surgical sponges can change in appearance after absorbing fluids and can be easy to overlook, particularly at the end of a lengthy procedure on the abdomen or torso.
The other most common retained foreign bodies include pieces of tools. For example, if a balloon used in a procedure breaks, fragments of the balloon are easy to overlook at the end of the surgical operation. Wires are also easy to break and easy to miss at the end of an operation. Patients may also retain catheters, drains, needles and other types of packing materials, like sterile gauze.
Regardless of whether the item is soft, like a sponge, or rigid, like a clamp, the patient most likely needs to undergo an emergency revision procedure to remove the foreign object. Otherwise, the object could cause physical damage to the patient’s body. It can cause major infections. Retained foreign bodies can also trigger inflammatory responses that may affect the patient’s recovery.
Surgeons who carefully adhere to best practices should never leave items behind in a patient. Filing a medical malpractice lawsuit can help compensate those harmed by medical mistakes and incompetence during surgery.
