A health watchdog has warned that patients who are having surgery at a prominent NHS hospital are at serious risk due to mistakes that are being made in the operating theatre as well as the lack of equipment.
6 serious mistakes, that have been called ‘never events’ as they should never have happened, occurred during the last year at South London’s Croyden University Hospital, according the regulator. This included a surgical swab being left inside a patient after their surgery, 2 people given the wrong lenses during implants and someone having their wrong knee operated on.
The other two never events took place after the last investigation in June, and the details have never been revealed. Experts have said that the findings were incredibly worrying, and that these problems needed urgently addressing. The hospital trust has been issued with two formal warnings from the Care Quality Commission, and it now has 28 days to submit an action plan.
The lack of surgical equipment at the hospital meant that people had unnecessary overnight stays in the hospitals and other operations were seriously delayed. The report also said that the hospital’s maternity unit lacked vital monitoring equipment, which could cause huge problems if such a machine was needed urgently but the existing ones were already in use.
The shortage of staff was also highlighted, with patients reporting that while the care they received was good, the nurses seemed to be badly overstretched. Matthew Trainer in the deputy director of the Care Quality Commission in London, and he has said that the standard of safety and quality that they base their checks on are those that the law states everyone should expect, and are there to protect patients and staff alike.
