Minnesota Hospital Removes Healthy Kidney from Cancer Patient

By Anastacia Mott Austin

Doctors at Methodist Hospital in a suburb of Minneapolis-St. Paul mistakenly removed the only healthy kidney from a patient who had kidney cancer.

Instead of removing the cancerous kidney, they took out the healthy one. The mistake was only noted after the removed kidney was examined by a pathologist and it was found to have no cancer.

The tragic error occurred even after careful protocol was observed in the operating room in which the chart was double checked and every member of the surgical team reviewed the case.

The error was traced back to a note in the patient’s chart made weeks before the surgery, when a surgeon marked the wrong kidney on the chart.

"This is a tragic error on our part and we accept full responsibility for this," said Dr. Samuel Carlson, the chief medical officer for Park Nicollet Health Services, which operates Methodist Hospital.

While mistakes of this nature are generally not widely publicized, the hospital decided to go to the press in the interest of transparency and patient safety.

Diane Rydrych, a representative from Minnesota’s Department of Health, told reporters, "Being transparent is a major step forward in patient safety."

The patient, whose identity has not been released to the public, has decided to remain at Methodist Hospital while the medical team continues to work with the family.

Unfortunately, since the patient’s one healthy kidney had been destroyed in the pathology lab, his or her options are reduced to trying to remove the cancer from the remaining kidney, going on dialysis, or a kidney transplant. However, cancer patients are sometimes not eligible for a transplanted kidney.

The surgeon in the case has voluntarily stopped seeing patients until the hospital can complete its investigation into the case: however, none of the medical staff has been ordered to take leave.

Minnesota health records reveal that 24 "wrong site" errors occurred between 2006 and 2007, two of them at Methodist Hospital. The two cases involved a needle biopsy of the wrong lung, and an examination of the incorrect bronchial tube, neither of which resulted in the dire circumstances of the recent case.

Kathleen Harder, a psychologist from the University of Minnesota working with hospitals, told reporters from the Star-Tribune that while medical teams can put every precaution in place to prevent errors, they’ll still happen sometimes, because "…you will never completely eradicate human errors, because humans are humans," said Harder.

Added Harder, "[Sometimes] they remove the wrong ovary, take off the wrong leg. [If] it's wrong in the chart...that sets it up for a train wreck."