Reference no: EM133821125

Question

You are the risk manager in a community hospital. You receive an incident report of a retained foreign object discovered during surgery. The patient in question has had multiple admissions and surgeries in your hospital following a motor vehicle accident in which he was left paralyzed from the waist down. The patient has a long-standing relationship with his surgeon and trusts her highly. The incident report completed by one of the operation room (OR) assisting nurses indicates that at the start of the patient's most recent surgery for abdominal adhesions, the surgeon found a sponge in the patient's abdomen--a sponge that could only have been inadvertently left there during a previous surgery, because nothing like it is currently being used in the OR. In accordance with the hospital policy governing disclosure of mistakes to patients, you interview the surgeon to determine whether the patient had been told about the retained foreign object (the sponge) that occurred during his previous surgery. The surgeon states that she does not believe the patient should know because the problem is fixed and there is no need to upset him. The surgeon's rationale for not telling.