Hospitals in California reported 1,583 serious preventable events occurring for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2009, which is up from 1,224 incidents hospitals reported during the year before.

Below the highlights from a recently published article by Kathy Robertsen of the Sacramento Business Journal can be found.

A patient who had colon surgery at Marshall Medical Center in Placerville, U.S., carried a sharp-pointed surgical instrument inside his abdomen for six months before doctors found the device in a subsequent procedure and took it out.

A 91-year-old who went to the emergency room at Mercy San Juan Medical Center in Carmichael, U.S., with chest pains fell off the gurney, fractured his hip and needed surgery the next day to fix it.

These incidents are among the 1,538 serious and preventable events reported by California hospitals. There were 132 incidents in the Sacramento region, averaging 11 a month.

“These are major errors,” said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access, a San Francisco-based consumer group. “They are sometimes called ‘never events’ because they are things that should never have happened. The fact there are so many of them and they are rising is a significant concern.”

Medical errors, highlighted a decade ago when the Institute of Medicine reported that up to 98,000 people die in U.S. hospitals each year due to preventable mistakes, gained new attention last year.

Medicare, the government health care program for seniors, stopped paying for wrong surgeries and reduced payments to hospitals if patients got complications from a preventable mistake. Some health plans followed suit.

“It’s never medically necessary to take off the wrong body part and it’s never medically necessary to operate on the wrong patient,” said Ellen Griffith, a spokeswoman for Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in Washington, D.C.