Medical Negligence, Big Time By Mrs Vera West

Here is an incredible story from New Zealand, covered in America, of a woman who had a surgical tool, the size of a dinner plate left inside her after the delivery of her baby by C-section. It took sometime for the medicos to figure this out, and after a time, negligence was found by an investigating board. But, the moral here is that if mistakes can be made with something as simple as doing a surgical tools count, how much more easily can mistakes be made with drugs, and, perish the thought, vaccines?

https://nypost.com/2023/09/05/dinner-plate-sized-surgical-tool-left-inside-womans-body/

“A woman complaining of chronic pain discovered that she had a surgical tool the size of a dinner plate inside her abdomen more than a year after delivering her baby via cesarean section, health officials said.

An extra large Alexis retractor, or AWR — a device used to draw back the edges of a wound during surgery that can measure 6 inches in diameter — was left inside the mother’s body after the birth of her baby at Auckland City Hospital in 2020, according to a report by New Zealand’s health and disability commissioner.

“It should be noted that the retractor, a round, soft tubal instrument of transparent plastic fixed on two rings, is a large item, about the size of a dinner plate,” the newly released report read. “Usually, it would be removed after closing the uterine incision.”

The patient suffered agonizing pain for 18 months, until the AWR was discovered on an abdominal CT scan and finally removed in 2021 — after multiple check-ups that failed to identify the problem.

Te Whatu Ora Te Toka Tumai Auckland, formerly known as the Auckland District Health Board, previously denied that it had failed to exercise reasonable skill and care toward the patient, pointing to “known error rates.”

On Monday, however, Health and Disability Commissioner Morag McDowell found the board in breach of the code of patient rights.

“There is substantial precedent to infer that when a foreign object is left inside a patient during an operation, the care fell below the appropriate standard,” McDowell wrote in her report. “It is a ‘never’ event.”

The patient had a scheduled cesarean at Auckland City Hospital because of concerns about placenta previa — a condition in which the placenta completely or partially covers the opening of the uterus.

During the delivery, a count of all surgical tools did not include the AWR, possibly “due to the fact that the Alexis Retractor doesn’t go into the wound completely as half of the retractor needs to remain outside the patient and so it would not be at risk of being retained,” a nurse was quoted in the report as saying.

One of the nurses present during the operation told the commission that she remembered opening a second AWR, which she said was “very unusual” and something she and her colleagues had never had to do before or since.

“I remember being asked by the scrub nurse to open another Alexis wound retractor … [W]e had none in the prep room, so I quickly fetched one from the sterile stock room,” the nurse said. “I opened this to the scrub nurse and left it at that.”

The nurse added that she did not include the second AWR with the tool count, “as at this time this item was not part of our count routine.”

During the next 18 months, the new mom sought medical help for her abdominal pain multiple times, including once at the Auckland City Hospital’s emergency department.

After the surgical tool was discovered in a CT scan and removed from the patient’s body, the hospital staff involved in the C-section were said to be “genuinely concerned” and “most apologetic.”

Ultimately, McDowell ruled that the health board violated the patient’s rights.”