Never Never Land
Published: May 23rd, 2022
7 min read
The Times Newspaper reports that "Between April 2021 and March 2022 more than 400 patients in England's hospitals suffered errors so serious that they should never have happened. They include the wrong hips, legs, eyes and knees being operated on, and diabetic patients being given too much insulin"
These are known as never events. They should never have occurred and usually investigated by the NHS. They include items being left inside patients which have included forceps, a pair of wire cutters, scalpel blades, swobs and other items. Hospitals are required to carefully record all the equipment used during an operation to ensure nothing is missing at the end. This article clearly shows the system is failing on a number of occasions. Thankfully out of the hundreds of operations carried out every day, this is a very rare occurrence.
The patient is often unaware something has gone wrong until the treating hospital contacts them or they discover a problem sometime after the procedure. On occasions this can be many months or years later. Depending on the source of the pain and the position of the foreign object it may be safer to leave it in situ, rather than risk a further operation.
Any health care professional leaving a foreign body in a patient is likely to be deemed negligent.
If you, a loved one, or a friend have been the victim of a never event and would like some advice, please contact one of the team for some No win, no fee, no obligation advice.
We accept cases on a no win no fee basis, backed by an After the Event Insurance policy, when required.
Forbes Solicitors have an experienced Clinical Negligence Team dealing with all aspects of Clinical Negligence claims for further information relating to any of the issues raised in this article, please contact one of the team on 01254 872111. You can also contact the team via the Contact form link on our website.
For further information please contact John Bennett