Brooklyn surgeons are using these magic wands to make their mistakes disappear.
Maimonides Medical Center doctors now wave metal detector-like wands over patients after every major surgery to make sure they haven’t accidentally left any gauze or sponges in a patient’s body.
The wand sounds an alarm if it detects the objects, which are affixed with tiny, radio-frequency tags.
The potentially deadly mishaps have long plagued local hospitals.
New York surgeons left 292 foreign objects inside patients in 2008 and 2009, according to a state Health Department report issued last week. That’s a 12 percent increase from the 261 objects left behind in 2006 and 2007.
Nationally, it happens an estimated 3,000 times a year, or about once in every 5,000 open-cavity surgeries.
“We are always trying to make things safer,” said David Feldman, Maimonides vice president for patient safety.