I don't want to scare anyone but 1) these procedures were put in place AFTER my "hypothetical" scenario took place hundreds of times and were reported in the media 2) even with those procedures there are still errors, often due to miscommunication somewhere in the line 3) electronic charting is great but there are errors in the charts all the time that can result in those "never" incidents occurring. If you ask a surgical resident the most important thing he or she learned during their residency, the answer is always "Avoid surgery if you can."I get the point you are trying to make, but the scenario you presented is so unrealistic it's funny. Having had multiple surgeries, I can assure you that there are many steps in place to prevent something like that from happening... From having the doctor confirm the procedure with you before you're put under, to actually initialling with marker the body part to be worked on, to checking the ID bracelet you're wearing and matching that up with the file, to having you confirm your name and other identifying info with that on the chart/computer...
So my scenario is neither unrealistic nor is it funny. It happens to real people all the time, and they aren't laughing. NHS, which keeps better records than the US for obvious reasons, recorded 38 "never events" from April 2016-March 2017. 20 were wrong site surgery. That's in a country with 65 million people. Extrapolate that to 330 million people in the US, and you have a lot of wrong site surgical events here occurring annually. And they have the same "time out" protocols in the UK as the US does.
I used that analogy so people can understand that organizations can and should ALWAYS improve on safety, and a "near miss" is exactly when that needs to happen. That is not a time to mock or belittle someone who is concerned or was involved in that near miss. Just as your hospital is negligent if they operate on the wrong foot, Disney is negligent if they leave people stuck in a hit gondola for 3-4 hours on an August afternoon resulting in heat injury. No one wants that to happen. And no one hates Disney because Disney needs to improve on something.