Call for monthly breakdown of surgical items ‘lost’ inside patients
Leading advocacy group, the Irish Patients’ Association, issued the call for action after figures revealed in today’s Irish Examiner showed that the errors occur every 9.5 days.
Freedom of Information Act details obtained after months of delays confirm that, from 2005 to 2011, 267 patients had items wrongly left inside them after surgery.
During the same period, 362 “clinical adverse events” also occurred, involving 81 “foreign objects left in situ” and 281 “missing/retained swabs, devices, needles”.
While the cases account for just 0.005% of all surgeries over the period, the chairman of the Irish Patients’ Association, Stephen McMahon said, the issue is not acceptable.
He said pointing to the vast majority of surgeries which pass off safely is “like saying if the number of road tragedies is small compared to trips taken, there isn’t a problem”.
Insisting that the issue be addressed, Mr McMahon said the HSE must consider publishing a full monthly update — including details not supplied in the FOI response such as which hospital was involved, whether the patient was told, what their outcome was, and an exact breakdown of what the items are — to ensure action is taken.
“The HSE should be publishing these figures and not waiting for someone to send in an FOI,” he said. “All hospitals have a surgical checklist where they count what goes in and what goes out, so the target for this [not happening] should be zero. You can’t discount the pressures staff are under, but there cannot be a degree of tolerance on this,” he said.
To help reduce the surgery risk, in 2011 the Department of Health sent out a circular warning of the dangers of foreign objects to patients.
The HSE provides all hospitals with a “safe surgery checklist” which must be read out and signed-off on during surgery.
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