D
espite years of preaching and teaching about taking time outs
and marking the site, wrong-site surgery is the problem that
won't go away. We spoke to John R. Clarke, MD, FACS, a pro-
fessor of surgery at Drexel University in Philadelphia and clinical
director emeritus of the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority, to find
out why wrong-site surgery is still happening and what you can do to
prevent it
Q
Why does wrong-site surgery persist?
When the Patient Safety Authority looks at reported inci-
dents, the problems generally fall into 2 areas — misidentifi-
cation and misperception. Misidentification is where the wrong body
part or person is operated on, either because staff or surgeons are
looking at the wrong x-ray, bad information is written in the docu-
ments or the patient is confused. It's true that the person most likely
to correct wrong information is the patient, but that doesn't mean the
8 6
O U T PAT I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E O N L I N E | January 2015
&A:
Wrong-Site Surgery
Expert
Q
Why years of time outs and
surgical site marking haven't
eradicated this never event.
Kendal Gapinski | associate Editor
