Patient left blind after doctor accidentally removed wrong eye during surgery – World News

WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES A patient was blinded in Slovakia when a doctor accidentally operated on his healthy eye in place of the damaged one, prompting an investigation by authorities

A man was blinded after a doctor removed the wrong eye during an operation.

The incident happened in a large hospital in Slovakia, where the patient was scheduled to undergo surgery on a damaged eye.

Instead, the doctor operated on the man’s good eye, leaving him and his family in need of psychological care and support to cope with the consequences of the mistake.

Slovakia’s TASR news agency reported that a spokesman for Bratislava University Hospital confirmed that the doctor who performed the operation is no longer in contact with patients.

The country’s health regulator has launched an investigation into the incident and the circumstances under which such a devastating mistake was made, reports said.

The blunder comes amid a turbulent time for Slovakia’s healthcare sector, with industrial action raging over wages and working conditions.

Slovakia has experienced a large brain drain, particularly to the Czech Republic and Austria.

Pressure on doctors remaining in the country has increased significantly due to the coronavirus pandemic, and last week the LOZ union said around 3,000 doctors are considering quitting if their working conditions don’t improve.

Operator errors are also widespread in Great Britain. Data from 2019 showed that over a 14-month period, 621 “Never Events” – failures so serious they should never happen – occurred.

That equated to nine patients a week, according to the PA news agency at the time.

The numbers showed that doctors had operated on the wrong parts of the body and left surgical tools (including surgical gloves, chest tubes and drills) in patients many times.

One patient had his wrong toe amputated while another had the wrong part of his colon removed.

Two men were mistakenly circumcised, while one woman had a lump removed from the wrong breast and two others had a biopsy taken from her cervix rather than her colon.

Another six women mistakenly had their ovaries removed during hysterectomy, precipitating them into menopause.