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A patient died in California after surgeons at Mercy Medical Center Redding left a sponge in the abdomen, reports a report from the California Department of Public Health.
The patient – whose name and bad are not identified in the report – was operated to bypbad a blood vessel blocked in the lower abdomen.
This is a pretty risky procedure, although serious, but for this patient, a wrong number of surgical sponges has proved fatal.
The sponge forgotten caused an infection of the patient's abdomen and he suffered a heart attack before dying of infection 10 days after the operation.
A medical team at Mercy Medical Center Redding, Calif., Could lose its license after leaving a patient operated on inside a patient to infect and kill him (image of the file)
Surgical sponges are the most common items left in the body cavities of patients during operations.
In fact, according to a 2007 study, surgical objects are left in about 1,500 patients, about two-thirds of whom are surgical sponges.
As in the case of the Californian patient, sponges are most often deposited, lost, forgotten or abandoned in the abdomen.
Sponges are important tools for surgery because they allow the operation team to soak up blood and other bodily fluids so that their field of vision is clear and the cleaner possible while working.
Sold in different sizes depending on the location and method of use, surgical sponges are usually made of cotton gauze or, sometimes, gelatin foam.
They are packaged in sterile packaging, but left in a body cavity, soaked in blood and other body fluids, the sponges quickly become fertile ground for the proliferation of all kinds of bacteria.
For this reason, if you were standing in an operating room, you would hear at various times before and after the surgery the outstanding nurse – who was attending the surgery but was staying out of the barren area – and the surgical technician (who directly helps the operating doctor) will ring during counting rounds.
Before the operation begins, the surgeon and the operator decide how many tools and sterile objects are needed. When they use them, remove them and eliminate them, the couple must count them and make sure that all objects are taken into account. time.
The final number of sponges, sharp objects and other surgical tools accounted for at the end must be exactly the same as at the beginning.
At the Mercy Medical Center Redding, the guidelines also hold the surgeon responsible for overseeing this process, as directed by the surgical center.
The graph of the procedure showed that the number of sponges had been identical to its beginning and end.
The half-enumerated nurse swore that all the abdominal strip sponges they had surgery with were present, which she confirmed to the circulating nurse.
Mercy Medical Center uses bags with "holding pockets" for each sponge to ensure counting and disposal.
According to the case report, the doctor in the operating room is supposed to check the number of sponges in the pockets.
But in this case, the surgeon did not do it and the surgical technician noted that the central divider of the bag could tear and that "the only thing she could think of was that it happened. A sponge covered two slits and looked like two sponges. instead of one.
This was not the way the bag was to be used and, in any case, one of the 10 sponges would have been inside the patient and the autopsy determined that this was the cause of his death.
The Department of Public Health of the California Agency for Health and Human Services holds the entire surgical term for responsibility for the non-compliance with hospital protocols and ultimately the death of the patient.
This puts Mercy in an "immediate peril" and makes important corrections to its policies and procedures to prevent such a disastrous incident from happening again – or risk losing its license.
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