Bolton hospital carried out surgery on the wrong part of the body

Potentially deadly mistakes made in hospitals since April last year have been revealed in a report by NHS Improvement, which details ‘never events’.

Never events are serious incidents which but have the potential to cause serious patient harm or death — and should not happen if national guidance or safety recommendations have been implemented.

Failings documented at the local hospital between April 1 and November 30 of last year when medics carried out ‘wrong site surgery’ twice

Earlier in the same year, one never event took place which was when a foreign object wasn’t removed after treatment.

The data made public by NHS Improvement does not detail the nature of each never event incident at the hospital.

But previously The Bolton News has reported on small piece of elastic-type surgical tape which was left inside a patient during bowel surgery, wrong-sized hip replacement being implanted into a patient, a vaginal swab left inside a woman’s body and the wrong skin lesion being removed.

A spokesman for Bolton NHS Foundation Trust said: "We report the number of any never events in our board meetings which are held in public every month. We take any such event very seriously and hold in depth reviews to learn from them.

"The findings of the review and any action plans are shared with the patient.”

Nationally, a total of 344 never events took place in hospitals.

NHS Improvement said that never events may highlight potential weaknesses in how an organisation manages fundamental safety processes.

The report states: “Never events are different from other serious incidents as the overriding principle of having the Never Events list is that even a single never event acts as a red flag that an organisation’s systems for implementing existing safety advice/alerts may not be robust.

“The concept of never events is not about apportioning blame to organisations when these incident occur but rather to learn from what happened.”