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A hospital trust has admitted it is "unavoidable" that parts of surgical tools get left in the body after operations.
An FOI request sent to the Wrightington Wigan Leigh NHS Foundation Trust (WWL) revealed that even new medical instruments snap off and are sewn up inside patients.
Over the past three years there have been 14 occasions where drill bits and other surgical tools have been left inside patients after leaving the operating theatre.
Most of the incidents were accounted to post-orthopedic surgery but there was one incident when a needle snapped inside a patients shoulder.
In another operation to repair a broken knee joint, a drill bit was lost and said by consultants to be irretrievable.
Doctors claim that by attempting to retrieve broken surgical tools "more trauma would be caused by trying to get them out" so they are often left where they are.
In the information released the WWL trust said that while uncommon: "The risk is unavoidable as it is the nature of the surgery.
"In the past new drill bits have snapped so it is not necessarily weakened metal."
Over recent years taxpayers have had to foot a £4.3m bill for a series of successful claims against the NHS for leaving "foreign bodies" under the skin.
But not everybody agrees with the WWL Trust diagnosis that it is unavoidable that parts of surgical tools are left in patients bodies - at a huge cost to the taxpayer.
Peter Walsh of Action Against Medical Accidents said: “It is very disturbing that it still happens regularly.
"It is almost certain that there are a lot more incidents of this nature that are unknown because people never find out about it.
"Also there will be a great number of people who even when this happens decide not to take legal action.
"What is so tragic is that these are such basic errors – they are so easily avoidable through routine checks.
"The only thing to be thankful of is that in the context of the number of surgical procedures carried out every year this is thankfully very small."
