Wrong eye removed: Hospital with major surgical error - patient goes blind
Created: 06/22/2022, 19:41
By: Patrick Huljina
In Slovakia, a patient had his wrong eye removed during an operation.
(Iconic image) © Maurizio Gambarini/dpa
A serious error occurred during an operation in Slovakia.
A patient had the wrong eye removed - now he is blind.
Bratislava - Operations always carry a certain risk.
Especially when it comes to particularly important parts of the body, the patient is very tense in advance.
It gets really bad, however, when something actually goes wrong during the operation.
A tragic example from Slovakia shows this.
Slovakia: Hospital removes fake eye leaving patient blind
A fatal error occurred in one of the country's largest hospitals in the capital, Bratislava.
During an eye operation, a patient's healthy eye was removed by mistake instead of the damaged one.
As the TASR news agency reported on Wednesday (June 22), the man is now completely blind.
The doctor who led the operation is no longer in contact with patients, a spokeswoman for the University Hospital in Bratislava, which owns the hospital in the Bratislava-Ruzinov district, informed.
The hospital offered the victim of the mistake and his family psychological care and support in dealing with the consequences.
According to TASR, the Office for Health Supervision initiated investigations into how the unprecedented case in Slovakia could have happened.
Slovakia: Healthcare system struggles with brain drain
The tragic mistake happened amid labor disputes in Slovakia's healthcare sector.
Just a week ago, the doctors' union LOZ threatened mass layoffs.
Around 3,000 doctors are willing to resign if the poor pay and increasingly unbearable working conditions do not improve.
For years, the Slovakian healthcare system has been suffering from a migration of staff, especially to the Czech Republic and Austria.
The work overload of the doctors who remained in Slovakia, which is therefore still increasing, was recently exacerbated by the corona pandemic.
Slovakia is also one of the countries with the highest corona death rate in the world.
The tragic example from Slovakia shows that doctors also make mistakes - often with serious consequences.
But the mistakes of other hospital employees can also end tragically.
(ph/dpa)