Hospitals in pursuit of excellence

Wrong Site Surgery

Health care professionals and patients all agree that wrong site surgery is a serious and preventable adverse event that should never happen. Although reporting is not mandatory in most states, some estimates put the national incidence rate, which includes wrong patient, wrong procedure, wrong site  and wrong side surgeries, as high as 40 per week. Recognizing this as a critical patient safety issue, eight U.S. hospitals and ambulatory surgical centers teamed up with the Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare to address the problem. The center and the participating organizations used methods such as Lean Six Sigma and change management to discover the causes of and put a stop to these preventable breakdowns in patient care.