ORANGE, Calif. -- For the third time in 14 months, a patient at St. Joseph Hospital in the city of Orange has had the wrong side of the body operated on, The Los Angeles Times reported Saturday.

A person with a bum left knee got an operation that was "inadvertently performed on the right knee" on Feb. 15, the hospital disclosed to The Los Angeles Times in an e-mail, the newspaper reported.

"No patient should have to go through this," said hospital chief medical officer Dr. Raymond Casciari. "There is no room for error when it comes to patient care. One case is too many," he told the newspaper.

State investigators are probing the wrong knee surgery, which comes within a little more than a year of two cases in which patients had medical procedures done on the wrong side of their heads at St. Joseph.

A hospital accreditation committee recommends that hospitals require patients to be marked with a pen where the operation is supposed to occur before they undergo sedation. But some experts said the occasional slip-up shows that proper protocols are not always followed.

The name of the person who got the wrong knee operated on was not released, the newspaper reported.