NHS: Medical Blunders Revealed - Tonight
The chief inspector of hospitals has warned four out of five NHS Trusts in England need to improve in patient safety.
It comes as ITV Tonight reveals the extent of serious medical mistakes.
Lisa Brewer, 45, from Essex discovered a lump in her breast just over a year ago.
She had a number of tests including a mammogram, which she was told was ‘encouraging’.
Doctors also took biopsies tissue samples from both breasts, to rule out cancer.
Two weeks later she received the results from her doctor.
Facing the possibility of having both breasts removed the mum-of-five had life saving surgery.
Lymph nodes and other parts of her breasts were removed.
Permanent scarring
She was left with permanent scarring.
Weeks later the hospital revealed it had made a massive blunder.
Lisa was told: “There’s been some kind of mix-up.”
Told she did not have cancer when she did
It meant another woman was told she did not have cancer when she did.
ITV Tonight contacted her, but she did not want to be identified: “I had to go through an additional, unnecessary, operation, but my breast cancer treatment was fortunately not delayed. I am now concentrating on my recovery.”
Fiona Strachan, an expert medical negligence lawyer at Irwin Mitchell, representing Lisa, said:
The NHS deals with over 1 million patients every 36 hours so mistakes like Lisa’s are incredibly rare.
Today the health watchdog the Care Quality Commission's (CQC) chief inspector of hospitals, Prof Sir Mike Richards criticised a "failure to learn" in NHS England when things go wrong.
But ITV Tonight can reveal there is one type of serious clinical medical case that is now the highest in four years - these are called ‘never-events’.
There is now one of these ‘wholly preventable’ medical mistakes happening every day in the NHS in England and Wales (465 in 2015/16).
They can be the wrong part of the body operated on.
ITV Tonight spoke to one person who did not wanted be identified who had a kidney removed by mistake.
Sometimes it can be where things have been left inside the patient after surgery.
“Gauze, it was about twelve inches in length,” explained Vince Hibbard.
His father, Frank, went in for a prostate operation in 2001 and even though the operation went well, the surgical team left the large lump of gauze inside him by mistake.
It was left inside him for 13 years.
Luton and Dunstable University Hospital carried out the operation and also missed the swab in a CT scan in 2003.
Frank Hibbard died in 2014, just a few months after the gauze was found.
It had calcified into a mass the size of a small melon.
The coroner said it had ‘materially contributed’ to Frank developing a type of cancer ‘which ultimately led to his death’.
The Hibbard’s lawyer was Renu Daly, from Hudgell Solicitors:
The Trust has apologised to the family, and says safe surgery checklists are followed to ‘minimise the possibility of this happening again’.
Andrew Miles from the Royal College of Surgeons says the pressures in the profession “may be greater just at this moment, than it has been in the past”.
In the surgical and medical profession a ‘second victim’ is also referred to and this is the person who made the mistake.
Operated on the wrong leg
He said he almost operated on the wrong leg during a minor procedure, but the theatre nurse stopped him.
The NHS says it takes mistakes very seriously and is now turning to some unexpected quarters for advice - like the airline industry.
No-blame
Aviation experts say it has more of a ‘no-blame’ culture when it comes to people being open and honest about reporting mistakes and it promotes the legal ‘Duty of Candour’ among professionals.
The former Chief Inspector of the Air Accidents Investigations Branch Keith Conradi, will head up the Healthcare Safety Investigations Branch when it is launched next month.
In response to Medical Blunders Revealed the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said:
NHS: Medical Blunders Revealed - Tonight is on ITV this evening at 7.30pm
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