Surgery on wrong spinal disc among hospital blunders

Malpractice at nearby hospitals have included objects left inside patients after operations and procedures carried out on the wrong area, it has been revealed.

A total of 21 ‘never events’ – serious incidents the NHS say are preventable if the relevant preventative measures have been put in place – were recorded, with nine at Princess Alexandra Hospital Trust, eight at Barnet & Chase Farm Hospitals Trust and four at East and North Hertfordshire Trust.

The incidents, which happened over the last four years, were revealed under the Freedom of Information Act.

At the Princess Alexandra Hospital (PAH) Trust, which has the 489-bed PAH Hospital at Harlow, four objects were found inside patients after their operations, three surgeries were on the wrong part of the body, one patient had thier naso or or-gastric tubes misplaced and in one case, a patient was misidentified.

A PAH spokesman said: “We are clear that these events are very serious and should not have happened. “However, some of the incidents have been wrongly identified and most happened some time ago.

“Since these occurred we have taken robust action on all incidents to prevent them happening again. In fact so much progress has been made that in the last year 2012/13 only one incident has been documented, which is a very good record compared to hospitals across the rest of the country.”

At Barnet and Chase Farm Hospitals Trust, which includes the 509-bed Chase Farm Hospital in Enfield, foreign objects were found inside four patients after surgery and there were two cases of wrong site surgery.

One patient has the wrong gas administered and another was wrongly given a drug used in chemotherapy and abortions.

Four were at the East and North Hertfordshire Trust, which includes Hertford County Hospital, Stevenage’s Lister Hospital and the Queen Elizabeth II Hospital in Welwyn Garden City.

Three of these were listed as retained foreign object post-operation and one was listed as wrong site surgery.

Two of these were in 2012.

In January 2012, surgery was carried out on the wrong spinal disc before the patient was operated on again.

Last November, a patient discovered a vaginal swab had been left inside them after giving birth.

A spokesman for the trust said they had carried out 64,141 operations during the four year period but described the never events as “four too many”.

“The disc would have been marked up on an x-ray and checks before, during and after surgery should have prevented this.

“(Regarding the vaginal swab incident) it terms of a fix that’s relatively straight forward, but it should have been counted in and counted out.

“The risk is tiny but it shouldn’t have happened.”

The spokesman said patients who were the victims of never events were kept fully informed of the subsequent investigation and its findings.

The investigation into the spinal surgery is still underway but new procedure are in place following the swab incident.

This article is courtesy of the Hertfordshire Mercury.