D.C. doctors sliced open the wrong breast on a cancer patient, operated on the wrong part of a patient’s spine, sewed up patients with needles and sponges still inside and tried to revive a stricken patient with a broken ventilator, a new city report has found.
There were at least 529 “adverse events” in District hospitals and clinics in the 12 months between July 2007 and June 2008, the city Department of Health’s annual report has found. At least 14 of these errors cost a patient his or her life, the report found.
More than 1 million people are killed or injured by medical errors in the United States every year. In 2006, D.C.’s council required the department of health to gather data on medical mistakes from hospitals and clinics in the hopes that local doctors and staff could learn from others’ errors.
Nearly three-fourths of the mistakes occurred in city hospitals, the recently released report concluded.
Many of the “events” were the result of paperwork errors. The report provides a brief snapshot of a woman who was scheduled for a right breast biopsy but someone wrote down the left breast.
An attendant in the operating room told the surgeon about the error, but the surgeon didn’t hear.
Faulty equipment also took its toll. One patient went into respiratory distress while recovering from surgery. Staff hooked the patient up to a ventilator, but the machine was broken. The patient died.
At least seven people died because they were given the wrong medicine, or the wrong dose of medicine, the annual report found.
A mother died in childbirth — during an otherwise low-risk Caesarean section — because the hospital “did not identify risk reduction strategies,” the annual report found.
The annual report may be just the tip of the iceberg: The Department of Health reported that only 10 of 15 hospitals participated in the report; only two of 21 nursing homes participated.
