Too many "never events" in the OR, study finds | MassDevice.com On Call

A Johns Hopkins study finds that there are 4,000 "never events" per year in U.S. operating rooms, nearly half of them involving foreign objects left behind inside of patients following a procedure.

MASSDEVICE ON CALL — High-stakes surgical mistakes defines as "never events" occur more than 4,000 times per year in the U.S., according to a study by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine researchers.

About half of those incidents involve "foreign objects" left inside of patients following surgery, a quarter of cases involved surgeons who performed the wrong procedure, nearly another quarter involved procedures performed on the wrote site and a small set involved procedures performed on the wrong patient.

"Every hospital leader in the country knows 1 such incident is too many," American Hospital Assn. safety & quality vice president Nancy Foster told the Wall Street Journal [1]. "And now the challenge is to make sure we understand which strategy we can implement that would be effective in diminishing the numbers even further."