Just How Often Do Doctors Totally F**k Up During Surgery?

Find out how common it is for them to perform the wrong procedures, leave instruments inside of people, and more.

Mistakes happen, right? But they’re not something you want happening when you’re lying on an operating table.

In an unnerving new study published in the journal Surgery, researchers out of the Mayo Clinic analyzed “never events” (a.k.a., events that should never take place during operative and invasive procedures—we’re talking retained foreign objects, procedures being done on the wrong side of the body or at the wrong site on the body, the wrong implants being used, and the wrong procedure being done). They examined 1.5 million operations and invasive procedures over the course of five years, from August 31, 2009 to August 31, 2014, using a system that was originally designed to investigate military plane crashes.

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The researchers identified 69 “never events” (they originally identified 70 but couldn’t analyze one due to unavailability of resources), estimating the rate of “never events” to be one in every 22,000 procedures performed. (And if that sounds scary to you, know that a previous retrospective analysis of “never events” in the U.S. put the rate at one in 12,248—so we're heading in the right direction.)

Here’s a breakdown of some of the researchers’ additional findings:

Several Kinds of 'Never Events' Are Happening
It’s definitely not just one type. Out of the 69 analyzed “never events,” 35 percent were “wrong procedures,” 30 percent were “wrong side/sites,” 28 percent were “retained foreign objects,” and seven percent were “wrong implants.” Oh, and get this: “Interestingly, almost two-thirds of the events occurred in minor procedures, where surgical complexity itself does not play a leading role,” wrote the authors in the study text. So that’s not comforting…

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These Events Are Being Discovered Pretty Quickly
In 68 percent of the cases, people figured out that something went wrong on the day of. Eighty-seven percent of the blunders had been caught by a week in, and all were unearthed by a year post-procedure. Good news, we guess?

Lots of Stuff Has to Go Awry for a 'Never Event' to Take Place
The researchers found that each event had a mean of nine contributing factors that led to the big error. Retained foreign object and wrong implant errors tended to have more contributing factors per event than wrong procedures and wrong side/site mistakes. Some of the more common contributing factors overall were confirmation bias, meaning “a bias that leads a person to interpret information in a way that confirms one’s beliefs,” according to the authors; failure to understand; channeled attention on a single issue; and inadequate communication.

The study authors wrote, “Targeting interventions to address cognitive factors and team resource management as well as perceptual biases may decrease errors and further improve patient safety.” We’re definitely in support of that.