For cases at high risk of retained instruments or foreign bodies after surgery, screening plain film x-ray would be cost-effective and should be routine, according to a report in the Jan. 16 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. Based on claims and incident reports, investigators found several risk factors, including emergencies, unplanned changes in procedure, and higher body mass index (BMI).
“In the majority of cases, foreign bodies go undetected despite proper procedures,” write Atul A. Gawande, MD, MPH, and colleagues from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. “Previous descriptive studies have been unable to establish the human and systems-related factors involved.”
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