ABDOMINAL FOREIGN BODIES: RELEVANCE AND PREVENTION

Patient safety during surgical procedures has been a pressing issue for many years. For this reason, theWorld Health Organisation (WHO) established the World Alliance for Patient Safety in 2004. As part of this alliance, a campaign entitled “Safe Surgery Saves Lives” was launched in 2008. Care-related injury is iatrogenic and, unlike complications of disease, is preventable (WHO, 2019).The unintentional leaving of foreign bodies in a patient's body during surgical procedures, is defined as “an unacceptable event”. This event can have serious legal, financial and reputational consequences for the operating surgeon and the hospital. The article considers the reasons of unintentional foreign body retention in the patient's body during surgical operations, what foreign bodies are most often retained, the frequency of their retention, and at what surgical interventions this event occurs. Prevention and objective control techniques such as marker board, transparent bag-container systems, X-ray contrast wipes, barcoding and RFID tags are described.