Among surgical complications, surgery performed at the wrong site or on the wrong side ("wrong site surgery") represents a serious complication for both patients and physicians. The term "wrong site surgery" is used for surgical procedures performed either on the wrong side of the body or in the wrong anatomical region, or for cases in which an incorrect procedure was performed (e.g., wrong-patient surgery). Such errors are classified as "sentinel events" and are also referred to as "never events," in the sense that they should never occur under any circumstances.
Frequency
A study conducted in 2007 found that the incidence of wrong-site surgery in neurosurgery was 4.5 per 10,000 operations for lumbar procedures, 6.8 per 100,000 operations for cervical disc herniations, and 2.2 per 10,000 operations for Craniotomies[^1].