It’s not as rare as you think. And when it does happens, the results are horrifying.
This complication is entirely preventable, so what are hospitals doing about it?
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- A hospital fires a county’s only pediatrician
- Fires in the OR
- Can hospitals resist the urge to buy a surgical robot?
- The fired fires back
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Surgical fires are a horrible event and yes, they are preventable. However, lets put the numbers in perspective before we spend millions of dollars on prevention campaigns and scare the entire U.S. population.
Looking at the MSNBC article there are 30 serious, disfiguring injuries in 50,000,000 surgeries. That means that there is a 0.00006% chance of a surgical patient having a serious injury from a surgical fire.
Now, 600 out of 300,000,000 people in the U.S. get struck by lightning each year. Thus, there is a 0.0002% chance of living in the U.S. and getting struck by lightning.
Bottom line: You are about 3.3 times more likely to live in the U.S. and get struck by lightning than a surgical patient is to have a serious injury in a surgical fire.
Yes, lets prevent the surgical fires but let’s not go overboard on freak incidents. We don’t discharge patients in plastic wheelchairs to prevent lightning strikes. Or maybe we will once JCAHO looks at the stats.
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