It is an original story to say the least that took place in 2020. Operated by cesarean section during her delivery at Auckland hospital, a New Zealand woman in her twenties suffered for a year and a half from chronic abdominal pain. No one would have imagined that a surgical instrument the size of a dinner plate had been mistakenly left inside his abdomen.
Following an initial investigation, Te Whatu Ora Auckland, formerly Auckland District Health Board, said it ‘did not fail to exercise reasonable skill and care for the patient “.
But this Monday, September 4, Morag McDowell, New Zealand Commissioner for Health and Disability, found that Te Whatu Ora Auckland had breached the code of patient rights, reports the British newspaper The Guardian.
“There are many precedents to conclude that when a foreign body is left inside a patient during an operation, the care provided has not been up to the appropriate standard,” they said. could read our colleagues in Morag McDowell’s report.
The “Alexis” wound retractor, “the size of a dinner plate” and designed “to retract incisions up to 17 cm in diameter,” was not detectable by x-ray. In 2021, the young woman’s pain was so severe that she went to the emergency department of Auckland City Hospital. The device was then discovered “during an abdominal CT scan,” the report states.
The surgical instrument was finally removed from the young woman’s abdomen approximately eighteen months after the initial operation and after several visits to her general practitioner.
