Extra training to reduce mistakes at New Cross Hospital
All surgeons and operating staff at Wolverhampton's New Cross Hospital have been given extra training in a bid to improve its record for medical blunders, bosses said today.
Equipment and swabs were left inside patients after surgery in a series of serious medical errors known as 'never events'.
In total, 10 'never events' took place at New Cross between April 2011 and March 2012 and, to counteract the issue, the trust implemented new safety checklists as well as additional training.
Disciplinary action has been taken against some of the staff responsible.
Five cases of objects being left inside patients were reported, while insulin was not given to another patient correctly.
A daily oral treatment was not properly administered, while other cases saw a patient being misidentified, a person attending for a tooth extraction having surgery in the wrong place and the wrong gas was given to another.
As a result of the poor record any procedure that involves surgery or an invasive procedure away from an operating theatre has been subject to a more rigorous set of checks and tests.
The trust said it had a zero tolerance approach to 'never events' and has moved to reassure patients that it is doing all it can to prevent them.
Chief nursing officer Cheryl Etches said the trust had worked hard to reduce the risk of 'never events' with staff, patients and visitors and had undertaken a significant amount of work around reducing the risks in the past 18 months.
She said: "The trust has an excellent incident reporting culture in place which benchmarks well across the region, with robust systems and processes in place which ensure all incidents that may be harmful to patients are scrutinised on a very regular basis.
"This ensures any adverse incident is escalated immediately to the medical director and myself.
