Patients and caregivers are important partners in promoting safe care. Findings from this cross-sectional study reinforce the importance of patients’ perceived roles in ensuring safe surgery and highlight the importance of patient engagement in mitigating surgical site errors.

The Joint Commission and National Quality Forum both consider wrong-site, wrong-procedure, and wrong-patient surgeries to be never events. Despite improvement approaches ranging from the Universal Protocol to nonpayment for the procedures themselves and any consequent care, these serious surgical errors continue to occur. This study measured the incidence of incorrect surgeries in Veterans Health Administration medical centers from 2010 to 2017. Surgical patient safety events resulting in harm were rare and declined by more than two-thirds from 2000 to 2017. Dentistry, ophthalmology, and neurosurgery had the highest incidence of in–operating room adverse events. Root cause analysis revealed that 29% of events could have been prevented with a correctly performed time-out. A WebM&M commentary examined an incident involving a wrong-side surgery.

Wrong-patient and wrong-site surgeries are considered never events. This commentary describes a tool developed to decrease confusion in plastic surgery. The authors envision the tool to enhance team communication and preparation, which should reduce risk of wrong-site surgery.

The Universal Protocol requires hospitals to adopt time outs as a strategy to prevent wrong-site surgeries. This commentary describes how one organization combined elements of time outs and the surgical safety checklist to augment communication and teamwork in surgical settings. Implementation of the enhanced time out involved targeted education and clarity around surgical roles and responsibilities.

Despite efforts to prevent wrong-site surgeries, they continue to occur. This commentary discusses a near miss resulting from human factors and inadequate team communication to underscore the importance of reporting and analyzing incidents to enhance individual practice and teamwork.

This review discusses wrong site surgery in otolaryngology, along with preventive strategies such as the Universal Protocol, the WHO checklist, and radiofrequency identification tags.

A quality improvement process that included forcing functions resulted in significantly improved adherence to the Universal Protocol for prevention of wrong-site procedures.

This article describes how an anatomic marking form was developed, discusses its use, and reveals the effect of this process on patient safety.

This study surveyed clinicians and discovered significant variation in their time-out and site-marking procedures in daily practice. The authors highlight the dynamic tension between national regulations and local interpretations of such policies.

Efforts to prevent wrong-site and wrong-patient surgical errors (WSPEs) initially focused on procedural disciplines and operating room procedures. However, this analysis of WSPEs that were voluntarily reported to a Colorado malpractice insurance company database found that a significant proportion of WSPEs were committed by physicians in non-surgical fields (such as internal medicine). Root cause analysis revealed a number of contributing causes, with diagnostic errors and communication errors the primary culprits. Interestingly, the injured patients did not file a malpractice lawsuit in the vast majority of cases. This study confirms and extends prior research showing that many WSPEs actually occur outside the operating room. The authors call for strict adherence to the Joint Commission Universal Protocol in order to prevent these never events.

This study found that communication breakdowns, inadequate preoperative checks, technical factors, and human error were the primary categories identified in assessing the root causes of wrong-site craniotomy. The authors suggest that the events were preventable had proper compliance with protocols taken place.

This literature analysis identified elements that led to successful implementation of the Joint Commission's Universal Protocol to prevent wrong-site surgeries.

This systematic review of methods to prevent wrong-site surgery discusses the limitations of current preventive strategies, and proposes specific interventions to prevent wrong-site spinal surgery.

Wrong-site surgeries are considered rare but devastating never events. However, a recent article suggested that wrong-site procedures may be more common than previously thought, since such errors can occur in procedures performed in areas other than the operating room. This study sought to evaluate the incidence of wrong-site surgery in pain management, using data from 10 facilities over a 2-year period. Although the overall incidence was low—only 13 cases were found with minimal associated patient harm—most cases were considered preventable, as clinicians failed to follow recommended preventive measures. A wrong-site surgery near miss is discussed in this AHRQ WebM&M commentary.