Going to the hospital can be frightening, even if you have scheduled surgery and looked forward to a new pain-free joint for months or years. That’s because the place we go for healing holds its own set of dangers – infections, medication mistakes and even mix-ups.
Tempted to call off your surgery? Don’t! Fortunately, planning and vigilance can help ensure your hospital safety, says Peter Pronovost, MD, PhD, director of adult critical-care medicine and a patient-safety researcher at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore and author of Safe Patients, Smart Hospitals: How One Doctor's Checklist Can Help Us Change Health Care from the Inside Out (Hudson Street Press, 2010).
Here are three things that can go wrong and what you can do to greatly improve your chance that they won’t.
1. Wrong site surgery. Imagine going into surgery to have your painful left knee replaced and waking up to a sutured incision over your right knee. Incidents like that are rare, but not unheard of. As of June 2007, 592 cases of wrong-site surgery had been reported to the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, a nonprofit organization that evaluates and accredits hospitals nationwide. Orthopaedic surgeries were among the most common.
What you can do: Remind your doctor and other professionals who see you before surgery what procedure you’re having and where on your body. Before going into the operating room use a marker to mark your surgical site and have your surgeon initial the site in a location that can been seen when you are fully prepped and draped for surgery and ideally where the surgeon will have to operate through or at least adjacent to his or her initials. Also request that your medical records be available in the operating room. Your surgeon should be doing all of these things – and more – to comply with Joint Commission’s Universal Protocol to prevent such surgical errors. But accidents can happen. Best to play it safe.
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