Swedish hospital performed eye surgery on wrong woman

[Floater]

A 70-year-old Swedish woman who went to hospital for a cataract examination ended up having surgery on her eyelid by mistake.

“No one checked to make sure it was the right patient,” said chief physician Lars-Göran Holtby to the Arbetarbladet newspaper.

The woman was at the hospital in Gävle in eastern Sweden last summer after having cataract surgery on one of her eyes. Doctors scheduled the follow up to see if she might need surgery on her other eye.

But a series of oversights by hospital staff, combined with the woman’s impaired hearing, resulted in the 70-year-old going under the knife instead.

http://www.thelocal.se/22488/20091006/

A nice thing about this mix up is that the woman had the same problem with her eyelid, so she was quite satisfied with the operation after all.