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To err is human, but wrong-site surgery errors haven’t declined:

While wrong-site surgery errors in most cases may not cause severe long-lasting harm, it is still dramatic and more should be done by hospitals to curtail it. Wrong-site surgery error, is basically an error in which surgeons, say for example, cuts into the left side of a brain-surgery patient’s head, only to discover that they should have opened the right side. In most cases such errors if found on time can be rectified, in some cases it could be fatal.

According to a 2006 study of malpractice claims in the Journal Archives of Surgery, wrong-site surgery is estimated to occur once in every 113,000 surgeries, roughly 10 times less often than surgeons leave foreign objects inside the body. Though by medical error occurrences, wrong-site surgery is rare, nobody wants to go through unnecessary surgery or lose the wrong limb because of a tyrannical surgeon who created an atmosphere that discourages people from speaking up when they suspect a problem.

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