NHS errors mean eight patients die a day: Hunt

Consultant gynaecologist Ertan Saridogan gives Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt a demonstration of a laparoscopy system during a tour of University College Hospital HQ and Education Centre in central London yesterday, prior to delivering a speech on the ‘silent scandal of errors’ in the NHS.

Guardian News and Media/LondonThree thousand patients a year  - eight a day -  die because of lapses in safety in an NHS in which errors are so common that people have become conditioned to the thought of patent harm, the health secretary warned yesterday.In a strongly worded attack on how the NHS treats patients, Jeremy Hunt said that appalling failures in care such as those at Stafford hospital and in the Morecambe Bay scandal exposed this week shows that unacceptable medical practice is tolerated. The NHS fails too many times in the vital area of safety, Hunt claimed.In a speech on patient safety two days after the Care Quality Commission was revealed to have suppressed a highly critical internal report into its handling of baby deaths at Furness hospital in Cumbria, the health secretary said: “In the wake of Mid Staffs, Morecambe Bay and many other shocking lapses in care, we must ask ourselves whether we, along with other countries, have become so numbed to the inevitability of patient harm that we accept the unacceptable.“That grim fatalism about the statistics has blunted the anger that we should feel about every single individual we let down, anger that should be the fuel of an uncompromising determination to put things right. It is time for a major rethink,” Hunt added.While patients whose safety is compromised while receiving care represent a tiny proportion of all those who are treated, about 500,000 patients are harmed and 3,000 die each year as a direct result of safety failings, the health secretary said. Hunt cited the occurrence in 2011-12 of 326 “never events” - serious safety lapses that should never occur in the NHS, such as surgeons operating on the wrong part of a patient’s body - as further proof that the NHS’s safety culture is inadequate.While that was likely to be a significant underestimate, “the ones we know about include 161 people with foreign objects left in their bodies, like swabs or surgical tools; 70 people suffering wrong-site surgery, where the wrong part of the body or even the wrong patient was operated on; and 41 people given incorrect implants or prostheses.“Put another way, every other day we leave a foreign object in someone’s body, every week we operate on the wrong part of someone’s body, and every fortnight we insert the wrong implant. This is the silent scandal of our NHS,” Hunt said.“Yes, still, the NHS fails too many times,” he added. Robert Francis QC’s landmark official report in February, into the Mid Staffordshire care scandal, in which an estimated 400 to 1,200 patients died unnecessarily at Stafford hospital between 2005-08, called for the NHS to make “zero harm” its objective.In the wake of that report David Cameron asked Don Berwick, a former adviser to President Barack Obama on healthcare, to review patient safety across the NHS.