Medical blunders in the nation's hospitals invariably make headlines -- when they are discovered and acknowledged. The patient's right to informed consent has been severely tested by reports that two patients at a municipal hospital in Osaka Prefecture were recently operated on for a second time without being told the real reasons they were put through the ordeal. In both cases, foreign objects were inadvertently left inside the patient -- an 8 cm-long plastic cover from a surgical cleaning pipe in a 70-year-old woman and a handkerchief-size piece of gauze in an 80-year-old man. To avoid "shocking" the patients, they were told only that further surgery was required.

With little attendant publicity, the Health and Welfare Ministry has just warned all national hospitals to take immediate steps to prevent these kinds of medical blunders. In view of the rash of recent hospital errors that prompted the step, a great deal more attention should be directed to the ministry's sudden insistence on the need for patient-monitoring systems and its reminders to nursing staff to double-check that essential devices are in working order or have been switched on again after being temporarily shut down.

Why have such basic safety procedures not been followed as a matter of hospital routine? The lives of patients are put at risk when such obvious precautions are not taken. Tragic proof is the death this month of a 12-year-old girl at a national hospital in Matsue because the artificial respirator allowing her to breathe was not switched back on after being briefly turned off while she was bathed. The girl, with a history of repeated hospitalizations, was quadriplegic and thus unable to summon help using the bedside call button. Hospital officials acknowledged that they had no guidelines for handling patients on respirators and the nurse involved reportedly "cannot remember" whether or not she turned the machine back on, and if not why not.