A hospital in Rhode Island was fined $150,000 and has to install cameras in their operating rooms because they operated on the wrong body parts 5 times in the last 2 years!!
Yikes.
According to the article in Business Insurance, “The first time, RIH was fined $50,000 after brain surgeons operated on the wrong parts of the brains of three patients in 2007, health officials said… in its latest wrong-site procedure the surgery was on a patient who was supposed to have elective surgery on two different fingers of the right hand, but both procedures were performed on the same finger.”
Yikes.
A nurse I know recently told me an elderly lady recently came in to the hospital for an operation covered in Post-It notes in order to warn the doctors which parts to touch and which ones to avoid. I thought it was funny at the time but I think that old bird was on to something.