Wrong Testicle

An article from the San Francisco Chronicle today tells the story of Benjamin Houghton, who recently had surgery to remove a painful and potentially cancerous testicle. Unfortunately, doctors at the VA Hospital in Los Angeles removed the wrong testicle by mistake. The story descibes the hospital's procedures that are supposed to avoid this sort of thing...

By its own guidelines and those of national hospital regulators, the VA hospital was required to obtain informed consent from the patient for the surgery, mark the operation site and take a "timeout" in the operating room to double-check that doctors were targeting the correct site, doing the right procedure and operating on the right patient. According to Houghton's medical records, all three of these steps appear to have gone awry.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/05/MNGFAP352U1.DTL&type=bondage

Mistakes like this are said to be rare, but it is an outrage that they happen at all, and that the hospital seems to have done such a horrible job of following its own procedures.