The Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine recently approved a rule to regulate the practice of physicians performing procedures on more than one patient at a time.
Concurrent surgeries became controversial after a series of articles in The Boston Globe revealed how commonly surgeons leave an operating room during a procedure to operate on another patient in another room.
The Globe reported that three patients are suing a former spine surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital, and all of the patients are saying they did not know their surgeon would be involved with overlapping procedures. One of the plaintiffs, Red Sox baseball player Bobby Jenks, claims in his lawsuit that the double-booking procedures contributed to a failed spinal surgery that ended his career and led to pain that later caused him to develop substance abuse problems.
The rule from the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine will require documentation of the attending surgeon’s presence in the operating room and designation of the backup surgeon who will fill in when the surgeon steps out. (For more on the risks of concurrent surgeries, see ‘Concurrent surgeries: How much is too much?’ in Healthcare Risk Management, January 2016, at http://tinyurl.com/zth5eq8.)
