The 4,000 "avoidable" errors last year, according to figures obtained by the Daily Mirror, "included surgeons operating on the wrong person or part of the body, doctors making wrong diagnoses and the prescription of dangerous doses of medication."
It is easy to blame 'overwork' for medical negligence, but this excuse clearly does not hold water in most or all of the cases, such as when a surgeon operates on the wrong person or the wrong part of the body. Patients should have an identity label on them, and the leg, arm or whatever should be carefully marked on the body with ink so that the surgeon does not operate on the wrong side. And of course the notes should have been read with sufficient care beforehand.
Unfortunately in Britain there is a widespread culture of downplaying incidents of medical negligence, or, as here, attributing them to overwork, rather than to carelessness, incompetence or to faults in the system. When so many serious ill-health or fatality outcomes are clearly avoidable, then health workers should be scrupulous to avoid them.
When the Daily Mirror submitted Freedom of Information requests to all 172 NHS trusts to obtain details of Serious Untoward Incidents (SUIs), only 97 responded, and of those that responded, most refused to give details and just listed fatal errors as "unexplained deaths". This refusal to give details reduces the possibility of learning lessons from mistakes and is therefore, in my view, reprehensible. The supplying of details should be mandatory. Only by abandoning the culture of cover-up can our flawed health service hope to approach an acceptable standard.
Written by Margaret Wilde
Margaret is the author of www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk
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