Stockbyte/Thinkstock(WORCESTER, Mass.) — The Boston Globe reports that a surgeon at Saint Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, removed a kidney from the wrong man due to a mix-up between two patients with the same name.
An investigation by public health inspectors revealed multiple safety lapses at the hospital, but the most jarring involved the kidney removal.
Neither the doctor nor the patient is identified, but the incident took place in July when the doctor read a CT scan before surgery, which revealed a tumor on the kidney.
Yet the doctor apparently did not use a second piece of identifying information to match the scan with the correct patient and removed a tumor-free kidney from another patient with the same name.
The investigation found the hospital previously misidentified patients in three other instances.
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