Surgeons operating on the wrong side of the body, swabs left inside patients after surgery and the wrong implant being used were among the blunders happening at NHS health services across England last year, freedom of information requests have revealed.
Following FOI requests I made to primary care trusts (PCTs) across England, the figures revealed that at least 6,000 serious untoward incidents (SUIs), which include cases of patients acquiring
MRSA in hospital and confidential information leaks, and more than 100 'never events', defined as very serious yet avoidable incidents, occurred during 2011, and these are broken down by PCT.
Never events are serious incidents in healthcare settings which are largely preventable and should therefore never happen, and these fall into 25
categories, such as wrong site surgery, wrong implant/prosthesis, retained foreign object post-operation, and falls from unrestricted windows.
According to my results, the four most common types of never event in 2011 were retained swabs post operation, wrong implant/prosthesis, wrong site surgeries, and misplaced naso- or orogastric tubes, which can cause death if these tubes – used to feed or administer medicines by transferring liquids directly to the stomach – are accidentally placed in the patient’s lung instead.
These never events included:
· A wrong site intervention, where a patient at an ophthalmology clinic had an eye procedure performed on his right eye instead of his left eye (reported by NHS West Essex)
· As an incision was made, surgery theatre staff noticed that the operation had started on the wrong side of the body (reported by NHS North West London)