Surgical errors are also known as “never events” because they should never happen—but nevertheless, they do. These are mistakes made by medical professionals during surgery that could have been prevented.
How Often Do Surgical Errors Occur?
Surgical errors are the primary issue in an estimated 75% of all malpractice claims, as stated in a study on medical error reduction and prevention published by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Researchers identified 69 surgical errors among 1.5 million surgeries during a five-year period in another study conducted by the Mayo Clinic. Nearly two-thirds of these “never events” occurred during relatively minor procedures, such as endoscopy, interventional radiology, line placements, anesthetic blocks, and soft tissue or skin procedures. They included the following types and numbers of surgical errors:
- Wrong procedure (24)
- Wrong site or wrong side of the body (22)
- Leaving an object in the patient (18)
- Implanting the wrong device (5)
Other types of surgical mistakes include damaging nerves or organs during procedures and postoperative infections that develop because of non-sterile environments. Researchers arrived at the following estimates for two categories of surgical error in a study published in JAMA Surgery:
- Wrong site surgery: One event per 100,000
- Leaving surgical items in the patient: One event per 10,000 procedures