Surgeons at a hospital in Minneapolis accidentally removed a healthy kidney from a patient undergoing surgery for kidney cancer. The hospital made full disclosure of the glaring medical error afterwards in what has become an all-too-common occurrence at hospitals in the United States nowadays: wrong-site surgery.
The chief medical officer for Park Nicollet Health Services made the error known to the public because he felt an ethical obligation to report it. The hospital accepted full responsibility for the oversight, and assured the public that it would look into the cause of the surgical error.
According to published reports, the surgical error was discovered when a hospital pathologist examined the kidney a day after the patient’s surgery, and evidently found no trace of cancer. Methodist Hospital has not released any personal details about the patient, other than that the patient is still being treated at Methodist Hospital and that doctors are trying to resolve the dilemma of what to do next.
