Doctors Must Double-Check Before Surgery

Newsday ^ | June 22, 2004

[nuconvert]

Doctors Must Double-Check Before Surgery

By LAURAN NEERGAARD

AP Medical Writer

June 22, 2004, 9:52 PM EDT

WASHINGTON -- Starting July 1, operating rooms are supposed to be a little safer: Surgical teams must take new steps to prevent operating on the wrong body part or wrong patient.

Among the requirements: Much as airline pilots go through a safety checklist before takeoff, surgeons and nurses must take what's being dubbed a "time-out" before cutting. It's to double-check that the right patient is on the table, if he's really to lose a kidney and not a gallbladder -- and if so, on which side.

Hospital regulators hope the new rules will finally put an end to growing reports of wrong-site, wrong-procedure and wrong-patient surgeries.

"These should never happen," says Dr. Dennis O'Leary, who heads the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations. The agency can revoke the accreditation of hospital or other surgical sites that don't comply with the new safety steps.

This isn't wrong surgery because of a misdiagnosis, but mixups inside the operating room. In one infamous 1995 case a doctor amputated Willie King's wrong foot; indeed, the mixups are thought to be most frequent in orthopedic surgery.

But reports range the gamut from removing the wrong organ to drilling into the wrong side of a patient's skull to a recent case where the wrong patient was given a heart catheterization.

[valkyrieanne]

You could write the name of your operation on the relevant body part in permanent magic marker...

[Spyder]

Groan. . . (old joke but I laughed anyway).