Retained surgical sponge case? A new study conducted by Brigham and Women’s Hospital in affiliation with Harvard Medical School found that bar-coded, computer-assisted surgical sponge counting systems reduce the chance of counting error during surgery by 3 to 1.

An article summarizing the study results entitled “Bar-Coding Surgical Sponges To Improve Safety: A Randomized Controlled Trial” can be found at http://www.annalsofsurgery.com.

Previous studies have shown that counts are falsely reported as correct in the majority of cases of retained sponges and instruments, resulting in the surgical team incorrectly believing that all the sponges are accounted for.

Leaving surgical sponges inside patients happens more often than people think and far more often than it should,” said Atul Gawande, MD, MPH, surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a co-author of the study. “Surgical teams have been seeking a solution to this problem for decades and this trial of a computer-assisted method of counting surgical sponges gives us reason to believe a viable, proven and cost-effective solution has at last been found.”

It’s estimated that [u]3,000 to 5,000 cases of retained surgical sponges occur every year[/u], and that’s simply not acceptable,” says Bill Adams, CEO of SurgiCount Medical, a division of Patient Safety Technologies, Inc.
[/url]