Preventing Injury --- No Sponge Should be Left Behind
It’s the entire hospital’s responsibility…and particularly the operating room team handling surgeries routinely…to ensure that foreign objects are not left inside of patients after surgery. Yes, it does occur. It’s rare, but leaving a sponge inside a patient after an operation is one of those errors that simply should not happen.
A hospital should regularly review its surgical count policy to ensure that everyone on the OR team accepts responsibility for preventing retained foreign objects. One nurse recommends involvement of the entire OR team. The surgeon as "captain of the ship" doctrine is fading from view. The nurse conducting the count, as well as others in the OR, are just as accountable as the surgeon.
If you are a medical professional, take a look at what this nurse and her medical team have done to improve patient safety and avoid medical negligence.
At minimum, a simple checklist must be used. “With 234 million operations performed worldwide every year, universal use [of a] checklist could save hundreds of thousands of lives,” says Atul Gawande, surgical team leader and an HMS associate professor of surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Solving the left behind sponge problem, as you can see, involves not only better sponge counting, but a system that reduces complications during surgery for all patients.