Surgeon removes wrong kidney from patient

A California surgeon who removed the wrong kidney from a
federal inmate was placed on probation by the state medical
board.
The California Medical Board ruled Dr. Charles Coonan
Streit, a urologist who has had a license to practice for 41
years, committed "an extreme departure from the standard
of care" when he relied on his memory and removed a
healthy kidney from the 59-year-old federal inmate at St.
Jude Medical Center in Fullerton in 2012.
The board said the error put the patient's "future renal
function in jeopardy" and forced him to undergo a second
surgery to remove the cancer-stricken kidney.
The hospital was fined $100,000 by the state Department of
Health after an investigation found CT scans showing the
affected the kidney had been left in the office of a surgical
team doctor on the day of the surgery.
Streit was placed on probation for three years and ordered
to enroll in a wrong-site surgery class at the University of
California-San Diego School of Medicine within 60 days. He
was also banned from supervising physician assistants for
the duration of his probation.
A 2006 study in the Journal of the American Medical
Association suggested wrong-site surgeries are rare,
occurring an estimated once every five to 10 years at large
hospitals.
A Texas man filed a lawsuit in June accusing a urologist
and a radiologist of malpractice and gross negligence when
his healthy kidney was removed and a cancerous kidney
was left inside his body as a result of a CT scan being
misread.
New York's Mount Sinai Medical Center admitted last year
surgeons removed the wrong kidney from a 77-year-old
patient who was suffering issues with both kidneys.