Six patients a week suffering botched operations on NHS
SIX patients a week are falling victim to so- called ‘never event’ errors on NHS wards.
The incidents – mistakes categorised as so serious they should never happen – are blighting the lives of hundreds of patients, figures show.
They include surgeons operating on the wrong body parts, muddling up organs and leaving behind scalpel blades or other instruments inside their patients.
Women have had kidneys removed instead of ovaries, or fallopian tubes taken out rather than their appendix.
In one case last year, surgeons mixed up two patients, in each case performing the operation intended for the other.
In another incident, a man had a testicle removed instead of only the cyst on it.
Other potentially fatal mistakes include patients being given the wrong dose of chemotherapy – or ordinary air rather than pure oxygen.
Figures from NHS England show there have been 1,188 ‘never events’ over the past four years.
They include 420 cases when patients had ‘foreign objects’ left inside them after operations, including scalpels, needles, patches and cotton buds.
Another 400 suffered as a result of so- called ‘wrong site’ surgery – where surgeons got the intended organ or limb muddled up.
The mistakes also include patients falling from windows because staff have failed to properly close them.
Others have accidentally been given potentially fatal overdoses for drugs to treat arthritis.
The statistics show the errors are occurring just as frequently as two years ago. They reveal there were 254 ‘never events’ in the nine months to December 2015, about six a week. There were 306 from April 2014 to March 2015, 338 from 2013 to 2014 and 290 from 2012 to 2013.
Clare Marx, president of the Royal College of Surgeons, said: ‘This data shows an unacceptable level of preventable mistakes are still happening in the NHS … never should mean never.
‘Learning from mistakes and using best practice and guidance to avoid such errors should be the priority of every medical and surgical team across the country. The NHS must continue to learn from these errors so we can become the safest healthcare system in the world.’
Last year one woman had her ovaries removed when they were meant to be conserved, leaving her infertile. Another two patients were given the wrong types of hip implant and another the wrong replacement knee.
Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has previously described the scale of ‘never events’ as ‘utterly shock- ing’. In 2014 he promised to ensure the NHS learned safety lessons from the airline industry to ensure fatal errors were very rare. But the figures show no sign of improvement. An NHS England spokesman said: ‘One “never event” is too many and we mustn’t underestimate the effect on the patients concerned. However there are 4.6million hospital admissions that lead to surgical care each year and, despite stringent measures put in place, on rare occasions these incidents do occur.
‘To better understand the reasons why, in 2013 we commissioned a taskforce to investigate, leading to a new set of national standards being published last year specifically to support doctors, nurses and hospitals to prevent these mistakes.’