You wouldn’t believe how many surgeons have accidently misplaced their tools, inside the bodies of their patients!

If you go into surgery hoping to have your appendix removed, you might not expect to leave the operating room with something else in its place, especially if that something else is a pair of surgical clamps or a dropped screw!

Over the last five years, the NHS has paid out over £9 million in compensation claim to more than 550 patients who have accidently had objects left inside their bodies after surgery. Approximately two people per week leave the operating room with something that a surgeon has absent-mindedly misplaced.

These clinical negligences happen most often in emergency situations where the surgeons might be rushing or distracted or in situations where the patient is obese as the extra girth allows more room for objects to hide.

Experts suggest that this level of claims does not represent all patients who might have a foreign object left inside of them, because many people will not notice the item until it starts to cause them problems years later. Gauze can trap bodily fluids and cause infections, and instruments left inside the body can puncture an organ or a vein.

Donald Gable of Philadelphia, USA had a two foot long guide wire left inside his chest after a heart operation. The wire stretched from his upper chest all the way down to his groin. He was unaware of the wire for six weeks until it caused him to develop a blood clot. It was discovered by an x-ray and then removed, but it could have punctured a vein causing Gable to bleed to death internally.

A woman in New Jersey suffered a hernia and severe scarring after gauze was left inside her for six months. She sued the doctor and won a verdict of 5.8 million. One woman had a broken piece of a foetal heart monitor left inside her abdomen after a caesarean section.

A patient who was being treated for cancer in Seattle suffered a searing pain in his stomach for weeks and could not figure out the cause. It was only when he set off the metal detector at the local airport that the problem was revealed: he had a 13 inch metal instrument inside his abdomen. The same thing happened to a Canadian woman, who found that she had a ruler-length metal instrument left inside her abdomen.

The Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Jersey was sued for leaving a 21 inch guide wire inside a patient. The wire was not discovered until 61 days later, but it was too late and the patient had developed an infection which killed him.

How can you avoid this terrible experience if you need surgery? One of the things that you can do is speak to your surgeons and ask them to be extra careful not to leave anything behind inside you. Simply mentioning this will make them more conscious and aware and might cause them to double check.

You should also ask the hospital about their procedures for preventing this from happening, as many facilities will have a system of counting sponges and instruments to make sure that all are removed after the surgery.