Editorial: Surgical error rate should be zero
Patient Safety Monitor Alert
July 11, 2007
A Philadelphia Inquirer editorial touches upon the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority's study of wrong-site surgeries and concludes that errors are rare, but should never occur in the first place.
The editorial draws a comparison to the airline industry. Even though the risk of an airplane crashing is very small, there is no level of acceptable crashes. The same principle should hold for surgical errors.
The study found 175 surgical errors and another 253 near misses in a two-and-a-half year timespan.
