NHS blunders covered up?
Hospitals are covering up fatal blunders by doctors and issuing misleading information about accidents to patients’ families, The Sunday Times reported this week. Deaths are sometimes blamed on natural causes or untreatable injury, when in fact patients have suffered a drug overdose, a surgical error or misdiagnosis.
Clare Bowen is a prime example of such a case. She will never know exactly how her five-year-old daughter Bethany died in an NHS hospital operating theatre, after going in for a routine procedure to remove her spleen.
All Clare has been able to learn is that her child bled to death after a trainee surgeon used an experimental rotary cutter, inserted with a keyhole technique, during the operation. Several cuts were found in Bethany’s main artery, stomach and digestive system, but records that should have explained what went wrong have mysteriously disappeared.
New laws come into force this week requiring hospitals to send anonymous reports of mistakes to a central database. Failure to comply will lead to prosecution. However, the new reporting system by the Care Quality Commission, the health watchdog, has angered patients’ groups because it does not require doctors to share the information with victims or bereaved relatives.
Although many millions of successful procedures are carried out annually, Department of Health statistics indicate that about 500,000 patients a year are accidentally harmed in NHS hospitals. Only 30,000 of these incidents lead to complaints and only 6,000 to litigation.
“The NHS Litigation Authority says it faces liabilities of £10 billion based on reports it receives from hospitals of accidents where people would have the right to compensation,” said Peter Walsh, chief executive of the charity Action for Victims of Medical Accidents. “Yet only £870m, including costs, was paid out last year, suggesting very large numbers of patients must have no idea they are entitled to compensation.”
Clare said recently about the case - “You are in so much pain and despair after the death of a child that you don’t have the strength to fight a hospital, but that’s what we had to do,” Bowen said. “A year after Beth died we were still having meetings with the hospital and they kept changing their story.”
Managers at the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford, where Bethany died almost four years ago, have acknowledged the error that killed her and paid £10k compensation.
Next month Great Western hospital in Swindon is expected to face a £20k fine after claiming that Mayra Cabrera, 30, had died from natural causes an hour after giving birth. In fact her heart stopped because she was injected with bupivacaine, an anaesthetic infusion that was mistaken for saline solution. Her husband, Arnel, discovered the truth 14 months later. Last week the hospital insisted the death had not been covered up because the police and coroner were informed within 24 hours, although it conceded the husband knew nothing of the police inquiry.
A Department of Health spokesman said: “The parliamentary health select committee has called for a debate on the issue of a statutory duty of candour for doctors. We are setting up meetings to discuss these issues further.”
If you have any concerns about the treatment you received from an NHS hospital or other medical practitioner, then please contact one of our specialist clinical negligence solicitors to discuss a potential claim.
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