What can go seriously wrong in a hospital?
Victims of serious errors in English hospitals since 2012.
According to reports in the Press today, as many as 1,100 patients have been victims of serious errors in English hospitals since 2012.
A Press Association investigation has exposed that these inexplicable mistakes, often referred to as ‘never events’ – so-called because they should never happen – include the wrongful removal of a woman’s Fallopian tubes instead of her appendix, a man’s testicle instead of a cyst with more than 400 cases of ‘foreign objects’ being left inside patients following surgery.
According to a report on Sky News, other incidents include:
- A woman had her kidney removed instead of an ovary
- A patient had a biopsy taken from their liver instead of their pancreas
- Operations were carried out on the wrong hips, eyes, legs and knees
- Diabetic patients were not given insulin or were given the wrong type of blood during a transfusion
- Some patients had feeding tubes which are meant to be fed into their stomach put in their lung – a mistake that can prove fatal
- Patients have been mixed up or fallen through poorly secured windows, while prisoners have escaped while in hospital
Things can and do go wrong
With around 4.6m hospital admissions requiring surrey each year, it is fair to say that these incidents are indeed rare, but the report does highlight what can go wrong, and raises a question mark about what an individual should do if they fall victim to clinical negligence including medical misdiagnosis or a wrongful procedure.
In the past two years alone, we have worked on many cases as diverse as the failure of an A+E department to correctly deal with a diabetic patient’s infection, to an optometrist who failed to refer a patient for a specialist consultation and in so doing failed to deal correctly with a very serious illness.
Our expertise, from the first free consultation, will be used to help lead you through the myriad difficulties of such cases to a position where you feel that you are 100% satisfied with the outcome. Such cases can take many months or longer to resolve and you can be assured of the continuity of our attention and diligence.
If this is a topic that affects you, please call Phillip Holt on 020 8891 6141, and he will be able to discuss the best action to ensure you receive the justice and treatment you deserve.