Published on March 11, 2013 at 4:56 AM
USA Today reports that many hospitals have not adopted technologies that would help elminate the risk of leaving sponges in patients during surgery. Meanwhile, the Associated Press offers a list to help patients avoid problems in the hospital.
USA Today: What Surgeons Leave Behind Costs Some Patients
Thousands of patients a year leave the nation's operating rooms with surgical items in their bodies. And despite occasional tales of forceps, clamps and other hardware showing up in post-operative X-rays, those items are almost never the problem. Most often, it's the gauzy, cotton sponges that doctors use throughout operations to soak up blood and other fluids, a USA TODAY examination shows. Yet thousands of hospitals and surgical centers have failed to adopt readily available technologies that all but eliminate the risk of leaving sponges in patients (Eisler, 3/8).
The Associated Press: How To Avert Problems For A Happy Hospital Stay
Hospital stays can be scary, but they don't have to be. A stay in the hospital can be stressful, whether it's an emergency visit, a birth of a child or a planned surgery. But there are a number of things patients and their relatives or friends can do in order to make stays in the hospital more comfortable (Johnson, 3/7).
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 This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
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