Hospitals in the Australian state of Queensland are going to stamp patients' wristbands with bar codes to cut down on the number of wrong body parts being cut.

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The Australian reported Tuesday figures show 31 mistaken procedures were performed in Queensland hospitals in the last financial year, including two spinal operations, removal of one person's tonsil by error and one patient who had botox injected into the wrong body part. That was a jump from six botched cases in 2005-06.

"You might think: 'Oh gosh, how do these things happen?" Dr. John Wakefield, senior director of Queensland Health's Patient Safety Center, said during a meeting near Cairns. "But as medicine has become more complex and we get people through the system quicker, there's more opportunities for mistakes to be made."

Wakefield said mistakes are rare, with more than 800,000 patients admitted to Queensland public hospitals in 2006-07, but preventable. So pilot projects will implement bar codes on patient wristbands to try to keep everything straight, including drug dosages, as well.

"For the vast majority, there was very little harm but we regard all these errors potentially as leading to serious harm," Wakefield said.