Sheffield hospitals admit to four 'completely avoidable' errors during surgery
There were four cases in the last year where doctors operated in the wrong place - or on the wrong patient
Sheffield hospitals made four completely avoidable errors during surgery over the past year, a report has admitted.
Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, which runs the Northern General, Royal Hallamshire and Weston Park Hospitals plus the Charles Clifford Dental Hospital, referred to the issues known as Never Events in its quality report for 2024-25.
The report will be discussed next Thursday (June 5) by Sheffield City Council’s health scrutiny sub-committee.
The report said that NHS England defines Never Events as “serious incidents that are wholly preventable as guidance or safety recommendations that provide strong systemic protective barriers are available at a national level and should have been implemented by all healthcare providers.
“During 2024/25, four Never Events were declared, and all were in relation to ‘wrong site surgery’.” That means the surgery took part on the wrong part of a patient’s body or on the wrong patient.
The report said: “Examples of actions that have been taken in response to Never Events include optimising theatre environments to be more conducive to completing vital safety checks and standardising processes for the viewing of medical photography to enhance identification of the specific surgical site.”
In total, the number of patient safety incidents reported in 2024/25 was 30,453. The number that resulted in serious injury or death was 152, or (0.5%).
The number of formal concerns or complaints raised by patients or their families was 4,241. Out of 1,117 complaints received, 1,108 were closed in 2024-25 and 602 (54%) were upheld or partially upheld by the NHS trust.
Chief executive Kirsten Major said in her introduction to the report: “2024/25 has been extremely challenging for the NHS as a whole and was dominated by
complex operational pressures, continued industrial action, high demand for both emergency and planned healthcare and a challenging financial position.
“All these things impacted on our organisation, but I am proud to say that our teams have gone above and beyond to ensure we continued to deliver improvements, all of which have impacted positively on the quality, convenience and timeliness of patient care.
“We achieved the majority of our 2024/25 operational objectives, but we know we have more to do in terms of meeting all the required levels of performance and in particular eradicating the remainder of the longest waiting times for diagnosis or planned treatment which includes some areas of cancer care.”