Wrong-Site Surgery: A Case Study

According to the Journal of Patient Safety, “Between 210,000 and 440,000 patients each year who got to the hospital for care suffer some type of preventable harm that contributes to their death.” Doctors are not perfect, but with some of the harms being preventable they should pay greater attention to what they are doing. To help prevent harm that could have been prevented they could check they have the right patient, double check they give the right medicine, and they could wash their hands.
Doctors and nurses should check the body part of the person they are planning on operating on to make sure they are doing the right procedure on the right body part. According to Joint Commission “wrong-site surgery occurs 40 times a week in U.S. hospitals and clinics.” That makes 1,920 wrong-site surgeries per year. Amputation of the wrong body part has caused many to live without either their arms or legs when they could have had only one side amputated. For example, when Bill (last name is not given) had to have his left leg amputated after a car accident the x-ray technician mixed left for right and had both his legs amputated. According to archive.riskreviewonline.com, 76% of wrong-site surgery happens from the lack of procedural compliance. A checklist, as recommended by Atul

Gawande on Ted Talk, is a great way to make sure the doctors are doing the right steps for the procedure on the person and reduce the number of wrong-site surgery. Doctors’ double-checking their work before, during, and after the procedure is a must-do to help reduce the number of surgical mistakes.
Pharmacists and doctors should look over the dosages and the condition to make sure the patient is getting the right treatment. An example of a mix up would be mixed patient labels. When a patient has their follow up and their chart is written on, sometimes the beds will be switched which causes confusion and one patient is taken for another. Data entry errors are also a huge reason for medical mix ups. When identification numbers are hard to read the wrong number is entered into the computer giving the wrong medicine to the wrong person. Simply double checking the patient’s identity and the condition could lead to a decrease in giving the wrong medicine to the wrong person. When doctors order medicine for their patients similar medicine names can get mixed leading to the patient taking the wrong medicine. For example an 8-year-old died, after receiving methadone (used to relieve pain from drug addiction) instead of methylphenidate (helps control ADHD) because of the similarities between the names of the two medicines. Looking over the dosages and the condition to make sure the patient is getting the right treatment should become a vital practice.
Washing hands is a vital medical practice that could save thousands of lives. According to dailymail.co.uk washing hands kills 98% of germs that could be harmful to the human body which will prevent diseases and infections from spreading. An example of diseases that could spread from doctors to patients is Childbed fever caused by the same bacteria that causes strep throat killing 20% of birth giving mothers (Atul Gawande’s Better). According to Abc News, more than 100,000 deaths in the year 2000 were linked to infections that patients received in the U.S. hospitals. The cause of this is said to be from the lack of washing hands. In the book Better by Atul Gawande, a physician named Semmelweis came to the conclusion that doctors pass diseases to their patients and he made all the doctors that worked in his section of the hospital scrub their hands with chlorine between patient visits. The death rates fell almost immediately to one percent. Doctors effectively scrubbing their hands can not only reduce bacteria from spreading, but also reduce the number of deaths in hospitals.
Overall, preventing harm could be done by checking they have the right patient, double checking they give the right medicine, and washing their hands.

Doctors and nurses should be more careful with the simple things because those are the things that could end up saving lives. Washing hands, for example, saved thousands of lives. Paying attention to medicines given can easily be prevented by checking over the patient’s condition and which medicine is made for the disease. Patients getting the wrong side amputated is also a medical mistake that can be easily prevented by paying a little more attention. Simply giving all the attention needed could save so many lives everywhere in the medical

field.