What’s in a name?
A new kidney, perhaps.
A New Jersey hospital has publicly admitted to a very messy mix-up in which doctors performed a kidney transplant on the wrong patient.
The incident happened on Nov. 18 at Virtua Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Camden, N.J. Doctors mistook one potential transplant patient for another because they had the same name and were around the same age, the hospital said in a statement on Tuesday.
“Mistakes of this magnitude are rare, and despite the unusual circumstances of similar patient identities, additional verification would have prevented this error,” Reginald Blaber, executive vice-president and chief clinical officer at Virtua Health, said in the statement.
The mix-up allowed a 51-year-old patient to essentially skip the lineup for a kidney, since he also needed one. More than 95,000 patients are on the waiting list for a kidney in the United States, according to data from the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network.
Doctors realized their mistake and gave the other patient the necessary kidney on Nov. 24.
Both operations were a success, hospital officials said.
Virtua Health has reported the incident to state health authorities and is taking steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
— With files from the Associated Press
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