Hundreds of patients have operations on wrong body part

Hundreds of patients have suffered from major medical blunders such as an operation on the wrong part of the body, or a medical instrument left inside them after surgery, an investigation has found.

New NHS figures show that in the past four years, more than 750 patients have suffered after preventable mistakes in England’s hospitals.
In total, more than 320 patients who underwent surgery were left with medical instruments inside them afterwards. A further 214 patients underwent surgery on the wrong part of the body.
The incidents are so serious that they are categorised by the Department of Health as “never events” - meaning there is no excuse for them to ever occur.
Further cases which emerged in a BBC investigation included 73 cases in which tubes used for feeding and medication were inserted into patients’ lungs, meaning the patient was at risk of drowing on food and fluids and 58 cases when the wrong implants or prostheses were fitted.
A routine gall bladder operation left Donna Bowett suffering constant abdominal pain after surgeons left a seven-inch pair of forceps inside her body.

When doctors attempted to determine the source of her pain, the nurse, 42, was put through excruciating agony during an MRI scan at Alexandra Hospital in Redditch, Worcestershire, as the magnets attempted to pull the metal object from her body.
Ian Cohen, a medical negligence solicitor and head of medical negligence at Goodmans Law, based in Liverpool, said the whole system of reporting “never events” was flawed.
“I think the figures are shocking,” he said. “They really are the tip of the iceberg.
“There is an emphasis on the ‘never event’, but actually there is a bigger picture: missing the fact that we have hundred of thousands of adverse incidents, never mind just 25 particular categories. And the danger is that it takes the focus away from a much wider problem.”
He said he feared that hospitals have no incentive to report “never events” because they may have to reimburse the cost of the procedure to NHS commissioners as well as paying for the patients’ long-term care.
Dr Mike Durkin, director of patient safety for NHS England, said there were too many such events, which should never happen.
He said: “One is too many in any week, in any day, in any hospital.”
However he said such blunders remain rare, happening to 1 in 200,000 patients.
In another case, a female patient who was admitted to a hospital last year for a hysterectomy, was forced to endure further surgery when surgeons realised that a swab was missing and must have been left inside her.
While they carried out a second procedure to remove it, they left a drain in her abdomen, which caused a large pus-filled absess, resulting in serious illness and pain. The woman, who was not named underwent emergency surgery to remove the drain and has now been left with a colostomy and facing further surgery.
In a third incident, an elderly woman admitted to hosptal after a stroke died when medical staff put a feeding tube into her lungs instead of her stomach. She contracted pneumonia after nutritional fluids went into her lungs.
Her daughter told The World at One: “You feel angry after, because you think someone’s killed your mum. No, they probably didn’t do it on purpose but that’s how it feels. You feel that somebody’s killed her.”