There are certain surgical errors that are so egregious doctors call them “never events” — mistakes like doing the wrong procedure, operating on the wrong patient or the wrong body part, or leaving an object inside a patient after a surgery.
A new investigation from the Dallas Morning News has found there are at least 200 reported “never events” at Texas hospitals every year, though the number is likely higher, and state law leaves survivors with little financial recourse when they realize what’s happened to them.
Emily Brindley, The News’ health reporter, joined NTX Now hosts Miranda Suarez and Ron Corning to walk through the findings of her investigation.
These interview highlights have been edited for length and clarity. To hear the conversation in full, click the ‘play’ button above.
The story of Beatriz Cerda
Grand Prairie resident Beatriz Cerda went in for a C-section a few years ago in 2022. Everything seemed to go well, but over the course of the next few years she had what she called intermittent pain. In 2025, she started having abdominal pain that felt like appendicitis.
She went to the ER, thinking that she was going to be diagnosed with appendicitis, and instead they saw that there was about a three centimeter long metal object inside her abdomen. It looked a lot like a suture needle, and it was. It had been there for three years since her C-section, still in the packaging. When they went in for surgery to remove the object, they pulled it out and it wasn’t just a sutured needle. It was a sutures needle in the hard plastic packaging.
Deadly consequences
Out of the tens of thousands of surgeries that happen in Texas every year, these are a relatively small number. There are about 200 reported every year. We don’t know how many there might actually be. It’s some number north of 200, but when they do happen, they’re really shocking. They’re things that patients think couldn’t happen to them and things that hospitals say should never happen.
There are some reported cases of ‘never events’ leading to death. That’s what the state data shows. Of the folks that I talked to, four of them are still alive. One of the patients has passed away, but it was not directly connected to the ‘never event,’ although it was shortly after.
But there are some cases that lead to death, and even for patients who do not die, there are some pretty significant impacts. There was a woman who was mistakenly sterilized and there are also the emotional impacts of having something like this happen to you by a medical provider who you trusted.
Solutions
There are two big things that patient safety advocates and medical providers told me can help to prevent more of these ‘never events’ in the first place. Those two things are systems with checks and balances that will make sure that patients don’t fall through the cracks, and then the other one is culture.
So, if you have a culture where people don’t feel that they’re able to speak up to note that something is going wrong, then the systems that you’ve put in place won’t have the support that they need to function.
Miranda Suarez and Ron Corning are the hosts of KERA’s NTX Now. Got a tip? Email Miranda at msuarez@kera.org or Ron at rcorning@kera.org.
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