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Home » Consumer Information » Medical Malpractice » Surgical Error

Surgical Tool Error

A very serious form of medical malpractice involves the failure to remove surgical items from the open site of the patient's body and ultimately sewing it back up with the object still inside. Although millions of operations are performed annually, there is a tiny percentage involving surgical tool errors. As appalling as it may sound, objects are left inside patients following surgery much more often than one would expect. In fact, a general surgeon at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital was so intrigued by this subject that he conducted a study; Dr. Atul Gawande found that approximately 1,500 people have instruments left inside of them following surgery per year in the US.

Looking at the big picture, situations like these do not arise too often considering the 28.4 million surgeries performed across the country annually. However, this is still no excuse for those patients that have fallen victim to this negligence.

One woman, who had a C-section during childbirth, was left with a piece of a fetal heart monitor inside her stomach. Another man had a 13-inch retractor imbedded in his upper torso following abdominal surgery. This was only identified when he began complaining of intense pain sometime after the initial operation.

Of the 54 people who participated in Dr. Gawande's study and filed medical malpractice lawsuits, 61 foreign objects had been found inside their bodies:

  • 37 patients had sponges
  • 4 patients had clamps
  • 13 patients had instruments such as retractors and electrodes

Most of these episodes required a follow-up operation to remove the forgotten tools, which could lead to tears, blockages, infections, or other obstacles. Objects were fished out of the abdomen, pelvis, chest, thorax, vagina, spinal canal, face, brain, arms, and legs.

Dr. Gawande discovered that a similar sequence of events and conditions led to most of the errors investigated in his study. He also said they happened in spite of following proper protocol.

An emergency operation boosts the patient's risk of having a foreign object left behind by as much as 900 percent. Unforeseen events that come up during an operation boost that risk by up to 400 percent. Someone who is overweight or obese is also more prone to being involved in one of these fiascos. If you or someone close to you has ever had an object left inside a surgical wound following surgery, get in touch with a medical malpractice attorney with expertise in surgical tool error cases.