Surgeon At Mount Sinai MC Removes Patient’s Wrong Kidney. A surgeon at Mount Sinai Medical Center removed the wrong kidney from a patient and has since been relieved of his clinical and administrative duties, officials at the hospital – one of New York City’s most celebrated – said late last week. The patient, a 76-year-old male, […]
Surgeon At Mount Sinai MC Removes Patient’s Wrong Kidney. A surgeon at Mount Sinai Medical Center removed the wrong kidney from a patient and has since been relieved of his clinical and administrative duties, officials at the hospital – one of New York City’s most celebrated – said late last week.
The patient, a 76-year-old male, was on dialysis, with both of his kidneys failing and diseased, until the wrong one was removed during surgery, hospital spokeswoman Dorie Klissas told the Associated Press (AP), adding that doctors subsequently removed the second failed kidney and that the patient is doing well.
Klissas told AP: “This event should never have occurred at Mount Sinai. We apologized to the patient, and we will do all we can to ensure that something like this never happens again.”
Klissas would not give the date and time that the incident occurred, nor would she provide the surgeon’s name, citing it was hospital policy not to comment about issues regarding personnel, AP reported.
Wrong-side surgeries happen at hospitals across the U.S., the AP reported, noting that many of these facilities try to make their operating rooms “mistake proof.”
In July 2008, a surgeon at a Minneapolis hospital who removed a cancer patient’s wrong kidney blamed beeper calls and other patients when he made a mistake on the patient’s chart, a state investigation there found, according to the AP report.
Wrong-side surgery happens frequently enough to pose a “significant risk” for many surgeons during his or her career, according to a National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) study, as reported on by NatureWorldNews.com.
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