You might have read of stories of surgeons leaving scissors in their patients’ bodies or operating on the wrong side of the body. These are not just horror stories but real human-errors that happen during invasive surgeries and are called surgical never events. Fortunately they are rare: an American study shows only 69 human-errors were reported out of 1.5 million surgical procedures in a 6-year period. But these errors greatly damage the patients, the doctors and also the medical institutes. How do these surgical events happen and what are we doing to prevent them? Dr Rajesh Singh explains.

<p>You might have read of stories of surgeons leaving scissors in their patients&rsquo; bodies or operating on the wrong side of the body. These are not just horror stories but real human-errors that happen during invasive surgeries and are called surgical never events. Fortunately they are rare: an American study shows only 69 human-errors were reported out of 1.5 million surgical procedures in a 6-year period. But these errors greatly damage the patients, the doctors and also the medical institutes. How do these surgical events happen and what are we doing to prevent them? Dr Rajesh Singh explains.</p>

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