A young woman went to court after a surgeon had left an instrument in her stomach following an operation. This kind of medical error is still very rare.
For Cécile, the nightmare lasted 5 months. As reported The Parisian, this young 24-year-old woman living in Créteil (Val-de-Marne) was the victim of a barely believable oversight during a surgery a year ago: the surgeon forgot a 15-centimeter forceps in his stomach. In November 2012, she was operated on at Saint-Louis Hospital for reconstructive surgery. Shortly after, the young woman felt very violent pain in her stomach. ” A month later, I was folded in two, I had particular pain on the right side, testifies Cécile in the columns of the daily newspaper. I was swollen and had a cyst just above my pubic area. I went back to the hospital, but I was received in five minutes, without palpation, and I was told that all this was normal. “
No apologies from hospital staff
After 5 months and ten visits to the hospital, the young woman is still not taken seriously. It was his general practitioner who finally prescribed an ultrasound, thanks to which a foreign body was finally detected, which turned out to be a surgical forceps about fifteen centimeters long. Reoperated urgently, the young woman says she received no apology from the hospital staff. The surgeon responsible for the forgetfulness would have simply said “Yes, well, it happens …”.
The hospital ended up acknowledging its mistake five months later, and paid Cécile 5,400 euros in compensation. Sum insufficient according to the victim who was dismissed from his CDI because of his pain while she was on probation. His lawyer called for the appointment of an independent expert to determine his real damage.
A very rare medical error
Cécile is unfortunately not the only one to have suffered such damage. In 2001, a 31-year-old Lyon woman discovered that she had been wearing surgical forceps in her stomach for 6 months. The same year, a three-and-a-half-year-old girl nearly died of suffocation after forgetting a compress deep in her throat by the doctor who operated on her tonsils. But forgetting a surgical instrument during an operation, if it is very impressive, remains very rare. On the 275 claims reports sent by the 77 private member clinics of MACSF, the leading insurer for healthcare professionals, only one corresponds to a compress forgetting and two to forgetting “foreign bodies” in 2011.
These errors are obviously sanctioned by justice. In May 2003, a surgeon and two nurses were sentenced to 3 months in prison for forgetting a 15 cm compress in the abdomen of a teenage girl. In March 2005, the civil chamber of the Brest tribunal de grande instance ordered a Brest surgeon to pay 13,330 euros to a patient who became disabled after forgetting a compress during an operation. The surgeon also had to pay the sum of 49,522 euros to social security.
From 1 in 1000 to 1 in 5000
In addition, according to the specialist journal Hepato-Gastro from May-June 2001, “forgetting a foreign body in the peritoneal cavity represents an iatrogenic surgical complication, the frequency of which, reported in the literature, varies from 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 5,000”. The magazine adds that “digestive and gynecological procedures represent between 60% and 74% of the causes of textilomas. [un corps étranger, compresse ou champ opératoire, laissé involontairement au cours d’une intervention chirurgicale, ndlr] intra-abdominals. “
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