Find the missing surgical instrument

You know that Hasbro board game Operation? It always sort of gave me the creeps. There just seemed to be something so wrong about fishing out little objects left in the “patient.” But, it’s a game. Unfortunately, there have been many real-life cases of foreign objects being left in patients during surgery, enough that a company has designed and manufactured a device to locate such foreign remnants.

The device, called the RF Surgical Detection System, is a wand that tracks and scans for tagged items, such as surgical sponges, instruments, gauze, and anything else used in surgery. During surgery, surgical nurses have the task of counting all items that are used inside a patient. When the surgery is complete, they must count the items and make sure it corresponds to the original count. The RF Surgical Detection System simplifies this task and also serves as a backup.

Currently there are some 100 hospitals employing the RF Surgical Detection System. For more information, see this article.

This was posted on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 and is filed in the Legal, Patient Care categories.