Even when surgery is necessary, it’s scary. Common patient concerns include anesthesia, operating on the wrong body part, infection, and surgical stuff left inside your body after you are closed up. All these prospects are fairly remote, except for the risk of infection. But then you read a story like the one recently published in the New York Times and you wonder if you’ll ever consent to being cut open.
Four years after undergoing a hysterectomy, Sophia Savage experienced extreme pain and vomiting. A CT scan found that a surgical sponge, an artifact of her hysterectomy, had lodged in her abdomen. She underwent another operation to remove it, but it had adhered to her bladder and other viscera, and caused an infection that required the removal of a large segment of intestine.
Savage sued the original hospital and won $2.5 million in damages. But that award has been appealed, and her health has declined seriously. Unable to work, Savage has bowel problems, anxiety and depression. It’s a sad coincidence that nursing was her own former profession.
According to The Times, 4,000 cases of so-called “retained surgical items” occur every year in the U.S. Most of the items left behind are the gauzelike sponges used to absorb blood. A long operation might require dozens of them.
Failing to remove these infectious time bombs, experts say, is the result of surgical teams using a clunky method to account for their use. Usually, a surgical nurse keeps a manual count of sponges used, but an OR can be chaotic, and it’s easy to miscount. In 4 out of 5 cases in which sponges were left behind, the surgical team had declared them all accounted for.
Despite efforts by groups such as the Association of periOperative Registered Nurses and the American College of Surgeons many hospitals, The Times says, haven’t updated their procedures.
So patients are left at risk, Dr. Verna C. Gibbs, professor of surgery at the University of California, San Francisco, told The Times.
“In most instances, the patient is completely helpless,” said Gibbs, who is also the director of NoThing Left Behind, a national surgical patient safety project. “We’ve anesthetized them, we take away their ability to think, to breathe, and we cut them open and operate on them. There’s no patient advocate standing over them saying, ‘Don’t forget that sponge in them.’ I consider it a great affront that we still manage to leave our tools inside of people.”
Although sponges account for about 2 in 3 retained items, post-surgical patients are carrying around all sorts of stuff: clamps, scalpels, even scissors. But they’re easier to spot in a surgical cavity than balled-up, blood-soaked sponges, which are more likely to be left behind during abdominal operations and in overweight patients.
Technology to the rescue! Sponges can be tracked via radio-frequency tags, which are about the size of a grain of rice. As reported on PubMed.gov, one study reviewed 2,285 cases in which sponges were tracked using a system called RF Assure Detection, which alerts the team at the end of an operation if any sponges remain inside the patient. In this study, 23 forgotten sponges were recovered from nearly 3,000 patients. The cost was about $10 per procedure.
Another tracking system employs bar code technology. Every sponge is scanned before use and again when it’s retrieved.
But as effective as electronic tracking can be fewer than 1 in 100 hospitals use it, Dr. Berto Lopez, chief of the safety committee at West Palm Hospital in West Palm Beach, Fla., told The Times. His advocacy of the technology comes from personal experience: He was sued in 2009 for leaving a sponge inside a patient. Two nurses had assured him that all sponges had been accounted for, but they weren’t. Now he won’t operate in any hospital that does not use electronic tracking.
Depressingly, Lopez believes hospitals resist electronic tracking because they don’t want to spend the 10 bucks.
But Gibbs, of NoThing Left Behind, believes technology should augment manual counting, not replace it. Some hospitals, she told The Times, use inexpensive “counter bags” in which each sponge has its own compartment. If a compartment is empty at the end of an operation, a sponge is missing. Then the electronic tracking system can help find it.
Gibbs also believes that counting sponges should not be the responsibility of only nurses: Everyone in an operating room must share accountability. “Technology is but an aid,” Gibbs told the Times. “The way that safety problems are corrected and fixed is by changing the culture of the O.R.”
If you or a loved one is scheduled for surgery, inquire about the hospital’s procedures about retained surgical items. The hospital’s patient advocate and/or your surgeon should be willing to discuss it. Ask if there is a technological tracking procedure as well as a manual count. If you are not satisfied with the response, you might consider other hospital options.
To read about some surgical mistakes that proved to be learning opportunities, see our blog “Medical Mistakes that Led to a Greater Good.”
