[July 06, 2006]

1.2m patients are put at risk every year by the NHS blunderers

(Daily Mail Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) AROUND 1 . 2 million patients are victims of Health Service blunders or 'near-misses' each year.

There were 940 , 000 recorded accidents over the last 12 months. But a hardhitting report says there could be almost 250,000 more that go unreported.

Massive underreporting means the NHS 'simply has no idea' how many patients are dying as a result of mistakes each year, says the influential Commons Public Accounts Committee.

But it claims the number of incidents could be halved if bosses took on board lessons from previous accidents and acted promptly on safety alerts.

Big differences in the number of blunders admitted by similarly-sized trusts - from a few to many thousand - suggest some may be discouraging reporting, the committee adds.

Chairman Edward Leigh said official estimates showed one in ten patients admitted to NHS hospitals was unintentionally harmed and there had been insufficient progress in cutting avoidable incidents.

Mr Leigh attacked the ' dysfunctional performance' of the National Patient Safety Agency - which costs GBP 34million a year to run - for delivering a national reporting system 'several years late' and for offering the taxpayer poor value for money.

He strongly criticised trusts for failing to tell patients when things go wrong - only one in four routinely keeps patients informed.

The 940,000 reports of incidents and near-misses last year include blunders ranging from medication errors and drug interactions, to missing emergency equipment and the wrong limbs being amputated.

Mr Leigh went on: 'These statistics would be terrifying enough without our learning that there is undoubtedly substantial underreporting of serious incidents and deaths.

'To top it all, the NHS simply has no idea how many people die each year from patient safety incidents.' He said the NHS was failing on a 'staggering scale' to learn from previous experience.

'Around 50 per cent of actual incidents might have been avoided if NHS staff had learned lessons from previous ones,' he said.

Peter Walsh, chief executive of the charity Action against Medical Accidents said it wanted an ' injection of urgency' to improve patient safety. He said even more patients were at risk than the report allowed for, because it did not include 300,000 reports of hospitalacquired infections each year.

'The scary thing is we cannot have any degree of confidence that things are getting any better,' he said.

'We want to see more teeth given to existing guidelines and safety alerts.

'It will come as a shock to many that some safety alerts are more or less ignored by NHS trusts.' A drive to improve patient safety began in 2000 when the Government's Chief Medical Officer admitted one in ten hospital patients was unintentionally harmed each year, costing the NHS GBP2billion in extra bed days and GBP400million in settled clinical negligence claims.

The Public Accounts Committee said the National Patient Safety Agency had gone at least GBP1billion overbudget in setting up a reporting system and was giving only limited feedback to trusts to cut serious incidents.

Safety alerts issued to trusts were not always complied with - although trusts claim they are, added the committee.

The agency's joint chief executive Susan Williams said: 'We have connected every trust in England and Wales to our national incident reporting system - the first of its kind worldwide - and are now receiving up to 55,000 reports every month.' Health Minister Andy Burnham said: 'It is important to remember that the vast majority of NHS patients receive safe and effective care. Only a small number of errors have serious consequences.' j.hope@dailymail.co.uk

RETIRED fireman Gareth Wilkinson died from a blood clot on his lungs after hospital blunders left him waiting ten days for surgery.

Mr Wilkinson, 56, should have had an operation on a broken hip within 48 hours of being taken to hospital after a fall.

But he remained in a bed for more than a week and died shortly after surgery was carried out.

A blood clot, or deep vein thrombosis, caused by lying inactive so long, travelled to his lungs from his leg. Mr Wilkinson, a fireman in Manchester for 26 years until he retired in 1998, had fallen down a some stairs in a pub while attending a conference in London.

He was taken to University College Hospital in Central London and transferred the same day to the Middlesex Hospital for surgery.

The coroner at his inquest last year, Dr Paul Knapman, recorded a verdict of accidental death aggravated by neglect. 'This is not a good story of treatment of this patient in the NHS,' he said.

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