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Comments
On rare occasions, a medical procedure is performed on the wrong part of the body
or on the wrong patient. These are called wrong-site and wrong-patient instances.

The Washington Post highlighted a few cases in a June 20, 2011 article by Sandra G. Boodman:
* An ophthalmologist operated on the wrong eye of a 4-year-old boy.
* Some men have undergone prostate cancer surgery although they were not diagnosed with cancer.
* One third of the cases resulted in death or serious injury.

The medical field is trying to reduce the number of wrong-site and wrong-patient errors.

A study by Philip Stahel, et. al. showed that among wrong site cases, 7% of the patients
filed a lawsuit. Among wrong-patient cases, 3% resulted in a lawsuit.

The data in this file represent the costs incurred by hospitals as a result of these lawsuits.

Source:
Data representative of patient compensation information from:
Philip F. Stahel, Allison L. Sabel, Michael S. Victoroff, Jeffrey Varnell, Alan
Lembitz, Dennis J. Boyle, Ted J. Clarke, Wade R. Smith, and Philip S. Mehler.
Wrong-site and wrong-patient procedures in the universal protocol era: Analysis
of a prospective database of physician self-reported occurrences. Arch Surg,
145(10):978-984, 2010.