Certain issues that arise during surgery are truly accidents or unpredictable events. Other times, what goes wrong during surgery is the result of overt negligence or a failure to follow best practices. Never events are surgical errors so severe that they should not happen in any modern operating theater.
Retained foreign bodies are objects left behind inside a patient’s body after a surgery. This type of error is a shockingly common never event that happens dozens of times a week every week in the United States. When are patients particularly at risk of this potentially devastating never event?
When undergoing abdominal surgery
Technically, surgeons could leave behind pieces of surgical balloons or gauze in any incision. However, when looking at a statistical review of reported retained foreign bodies, it becomes quite clear that abdominal surgery carries the highest degree of risk.
There’s more open space in the abdominal cavity than there is during knee replacement surgery, for example. If medical professionals aren’t proactive about accounting for all of the tools that they use during the procedure, they could easily lose track of small objects and close the patient’s incision with the items still inside their body.
Retained foreign bodies can cause severe inflammation and infection. They can cause physical trauma. They almost always require revision procedures, which can increase the recovery timeline for the patient.
Filing a medical malpractice lawsuit could be an option after experiencing a surgical never event. Patients who have to undergo a second procedure to remove a foreign object after a necessary operation may have reason to request compensation from a negligent surgeon and/or the medical company that employs them.