New York patients should be informed about the potential consequences of major surgical errors. These are often called ‘never events” because they should never happen, but they still do. Researchers from the Mayo Clinic identified 69 of these ‘never events” among 1.5 million invasive procedures that were performed over the course of five years at the Minnesota facility and detailed why each one occurred. The researchers identified characteristics that led to the never events as organizational, environmental and individual, and they discovered that 628 human factors contributed to the surgical errors. Around four to nine errors occurred per event.