South Florida Injury Lawyer Blog
It sounds shocking, but sometimes doctors operate on the wrong body part or on the wrong side of the body. This is known as “wrong-site surgery” (WSS).
According to a study by The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations, there are 1,300 to 2,700 wrong-site procedures performed in the United States every year. But these numbers may be just a fraction of the actual numbers since healthcare organizations are not actually required to report such mistakes to the Commission. Some estimate surgeons operate on the wrong part of the body as often as 40 times a week. Sometimes they even operate on the wrong person.
Wrong-site surgery victims