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Patient Safety Learning

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  1. Patient Safety Learning
    Fears that their data would be shared with the Home Office following the Windrush scandal left some people from ethnic minorities afraid to access cancer services during the pandemic, an NHS England document has revealed.
    The paper from the West Midlands Cancer Alliance said there was a “perception” the government was “accelerating immigration removals” and that, as a result, “individuals (particularly those affected by the Windrush scandal) are then fearful of accessing cancer treatment and may not participate in screening programmes for fear their information will be inappropriately shared with the Home Office”.
    The news comes after figures released last week showed the fall-off in referral and treatment of Black-British patients for cancer during the early stages of the pandemic was sharper than for their White-British counterparts.
    Referrals and first treatments for cancer dipped across the board in April last year.
    However, by July, White patients were receiving 77 per cent of the treatment volumes they had done 12 months before. The figure for Black patients was 67 per cent. This 10 percentage point difference continued in August and September, as treatment volumes for White-British patients recovered to 83 and 91 per cent respectively. Parity was achieved from October to December 2020, the latest period for which data is available.
    Read full story (paywalled)
    Source: HSJ, 22 April 2021
  2. Patient Safety Learning
    Last night’s HSJ Patient Safety Awards celebrated the innovative work of frontline NHS teams in a year when the challenge and necessity of keeping the public safe had never been greater.
    Patient Safety Team of the Year was St Luke’s Cancer Centre and the pharmacy team from Royal Surrey Foundation Trust, who achieved ambitious change to reduce the risk of covid infections of cancer patients.
    This year saw the introduction of the Improving Care for Children and Young People Initiative of the Year which was won by Humber Teaching FT and Hull CCG for their Humber Sensory Processing Hub. Website
    The Patient Safety Awards celebrate the teams at the frontline pushing the boundaries of patient safety and driving cultural change to minimise risk, enhance quality of care and ultimately save lives.
    Read full story
    Source: HSJ, 21 September 2021
  3. Patient Safety Learning
    Patients with respiratory disease have been overlooked during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the NHS storing up problems for the winter months, a group of experts including the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) has warned.
    Analysis by the 34-member Taskforce for Lung Health showed that referrals for lung conditions fell by 70% in April, with two-in-five (39%) of CCGs seeing no appointment bookings for respiratory conditions for the whole of May.
    On average, the group calculated a weekly average of 3,399 lung patients missing out on urgent and routine referrals during the COVID-19 lockdown, amounting to a total of at least 34,780 people, based on NHS England data.
    This was blamed in part on a general reduction in routine procedures during the pandemic, which will have affected all disease areas, but also the limitations on clinicians including GPs to carry out spirometry due to the risk of COVID-19 infection spread.
    But the taskforce - which includes the RCGP and the Primary Care Respiratory Society, as well as the Royal College of Physicians and Asthma UK - is now calling on NHS England to urgently restore services to pre-pandemic levels to tackle the backlog of lung patients requiring support. It said that failure to do so risked causing the premature death of patients who require urgent diagnosis as well as overwhelming the NHS during the winter season, when respiratory symptoms worsen.
    Read full story
    Source: Pulse, 9 July 2020
  4. Patient Safety Learning
    A witness to an inquiry into deaths at England’s largest mental health trust has been intimidated by “cruel and calculated pressure”, with messages described by the man leading the investigation as “truly shocking”.
    In a statement at the start of hearings into the quality of care at Southern Health Foundation Trust, inquiry chairman Nigel Pascoe QC said one witness had received threatening telephone calls, messages and emails, which he said were “totally unacceptable, damaging and deeply disturbing”.
    Mr Pascoe said the inquiry had been told Beth Ford, whose job title at the trust is service user involvement facilitator, had been intimidated by members of the public.
    Ms Ford, who has autism, was admitted to hospital for her mental health earlier this month as a result of the abuse, but has now returned home.
    It’s the latest incident to hit the controversial inquiry, which has itself faced fierce criticism from the families of five patients who died between 2011 and 2015.
    The families have pulled out of the inquiry and accused the investigation and NHS England of bullying them and going back on promises to properly investigate the deaths of their relatives.
    Maureen Rickman, whose sister Jo Deering died in 2011, told The Independent she didn’t believe any of the main families were involved in intimidating witnesses.
    Read full story
    Source: The Independent, 29 March 2021
  5. Patient Safety Learning
    A woman has been awarded $10.5 million (£8m) in damages after medical staff left a sponge inside her body.
    The sponge – which measured 18-by-18 inches and was left behind during surgery – was inside the woman's body for years before she realised.
    It had been left in her body after she underwent heart surgery at a Kentucky hospital in 2011. The bypass surgery is said to have gone wrong, leaving a mess – and as nurses rushed to deal with the problems, the sponge was left inside her body. 
    It was not discovered for four years, until she had a CT scan in 2015. In the meantime, the sponge had moved around the woman's body, shifting around her intestines and causing pain as it did so. She had her leg amputated and was left with gastrointestinal issues after the sponge eroded into her intestine.
    The patient's lawyers said the case should be a reminder to hospitals to ensure that objects such as needles and other sharp objects, as well as sponges, are removed from patients after surgery.
    Read full story
    Source: The Independent, 1 January 2020
  6. Patient Safety Learning
    An 87-year-old woman died after her carers gave her the wrong medication, a coroner was told.
    Heather Planner, from Butler's Cross in Buckinghamshire, died at Wycombe Hospital on 1 April from a stroke. Senior coroner Crispin Butler heard three staff from Carewatch Mid Bucks had failed to spot tablets handed over by the pharmacy were for a male patient.
    Mr Butler said action should be taken to prevent similar deaths.
    A hearing in Beaconsfield on Thursday, where he issued a Prevention of Future Deaths report, followed an inquest in November. In the report he said he was told at the inquest that the carers from Carewatch Mid Bucks gave widow Mrs Planner the wrong medication four times a day for two and a half days. She suffered a fatal stroke because she did not receive her proper apixaban anticoagulation medication.
    Mr Butler said he would send his concerns to the chief coroner and the Care Quality Commission. He said there was no procedure in place to ensure individual carers read and specifically acknowledged any medication changes.
    Read full story
    Source: BBC News, 27 February 2020
  7. Patient Safety Learning
    A mother-of-one died after a breathing tube was put into her food pipe, despite staff raising concerns it was inserted incorrectly, an inquest heard.
    Emma Currell, 32, had just received dialysis and was heading home to Hatfield, Hertfordshire, in an ambulance when she had a seizure. 
    An anaesthetic team was called to sedate her as her tongue had swelled and she was bleeding from the mouth.
    Dr Sabu Syed, who was a trainee anaesthetist, told the hearing: "I used suction to remove blood and I was able to push the tongue to the side and got a partial view."
    She said she believed she inserted the tube into the trachea - the windpipe - and had asked her senior colleague Dr Prasun Mukherjee to check the position of the tube.
    "Dr Mukherjee was busy doing other tasks," she added.
    Technician Nicholas Healey said he flagged his concerns when there was no carbon dioxide reading on the ventilator, which was not faulty.
    He said that both he and Dr Syed had raised concerns about the tube being in the wrong place.
    The court heard the hospital had drawn up a guideline checklist for trachea procedures since Ms Currell's death and staff were due to have "no trace = wrong place" training on the warning signs of incorrect insertion.
    Read full story
    Source: BBC News, 27 February 2023
     
  8. Patient Safety Learning
    Tina Hughes, 59, died from sepsis after doctors allegedly delayed treating the condition for 12 hours while they argued over which ward to treat her on.
    Ms Hughes was rushed to A&E after developing symptoms of the life-threatening illness on September 8 last year. Despite paramedics flagging to staff they suspected sepsis, it was not mentioned on her initial assessment at Sandwell General Hospital, in West Bromwich.
    A second assessment six hours later also failed to mention sepsis while medics disagreed over whether to treat her on a surgical ward or a high dependency unit.
    The grandmother-of-five was eventually transferred to the acute medical unit at 3am the next morning where sepsis was finally diagnosed, but she continued to deteriorate and was admitted to intensive care four hours later and put on a ventilator.
    She died the following morning.
    A serious incident investigation report by Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust has since found there was "a delay in explicit recognition of sepsis".
    Read full story (paywalled)
    Source: The Telegraph, 4 October 2022
  9. Patient Safety Learning
    A 58-year-old woman died alone curled up in a blanket on the floor of her bedroom as she waited more than five hours for an ambulance.
    Relatives of Rachel Rose Gibson believe she had a heart attack at her home in Wrexham, north Wales, only a short drive away from a hospital, but died before an ambulance reached her.
    The Welsh ambulance service said that on the day Gibson died, its crews spent more than 700 hours waiting outside hospitals for patients to be admitted, which meant they could not respond quickly to people needing help.
    Family members said Gibson, a grandmother of seven, called an ambulance at 4pm on 5 April as she was coughing up blood and in chronic pain. By the time an ambulance arrived at 9.30pm, she had died.
    Her daughter, Nikita, 29, said: “She was lying on the floor curled up in a blanket. It haunts me to know she died alone in so much pain.
    “I feel like I can’t fully grieve because I’m so angry. She only lives five minutes away from the hospital, but must have been in too much pain to get into a taxi.”
    Read full story
    Source: The Guardian, 22 May 2023
  10. Patient Safety Learning
    A woman has died after being set on fire during surgery in Romania, the country’s health ministry has said, in a case that has cast a spotlight on the ailing Romanian health system.
    The patient, who had pancreatic cancer, died on Sunday after suffering burns to 40% of her body when surgeons used an electric scalpel despite her being treated with an alcohol-based disinfectant.
    Contact with the flammable disinfectant caused combustion and the patient “ignited like a torch”, Emanuel Ungureanu, a Romanian politician, said.
    A nurse threw a bucket of water on the 66-year-old woman to prevent the fire from spreading. The health ministry said it would investigate the “unfortunate incident”, which took place on 22 December.
    “The surgeons should have been aware that it is prohibited to use an alcohol-based disinfectant during surgical procedures performed with an electric scalpel,” the Deputy Minister, Horatiu Moldovan, said.
    Read full story
    Source: The Guardian, 30 December 2019
    the hub has a number of posts on preventing surgical fires:
    Surgical fires: nightmarish “never events” persist MHRA. Paraffin-based skin emollients on dressings or clothing: fire risk (18 April 2016) National Patient Safety Agency: Fire hazard with paraffin-based skin products (Nov 2007) How I raised awareness of fires in the operating theatre  
     
  11. Patient Safety Learning
    An investigation has been launched after a woman died days after being found unconscious underneath her coat while waiting in A&E for seven hours.
    The 39-year-old woman is understood to have first attended A&E at Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham on the evening of 19 January complaining of a severe headache. She was triaged and then observed by nurses three times. Her case was escalated but she was not seen by a doctor before being discovered.
    When the woman was called to see a doctor, she did not respond. It was assumed that she had left A&E because she had waited so long. She was discovered and transferred to intensive care but died three days later on 22 January.
    A source familiar with the hospital told LBC, which first reported the incident, that the A&E department could have up to 80 patients waiting at a single time and that wait times could be as long as 14 hours.
    Dr Keith Girling, the medical director at Nottingham university hospitals NHS trust, said: “I offer my sincere condolences to the family at this difficult time. An investigation, which will involve the family, will now take place and until this has been concluded, we are unable to comment further.”
    Read full story
    Source: The Guardian, 10 February 2024
  12. Patient Safety Learning
    A woman was kept in police custody for 36 hours after having a stillbirth because of suspicions she had an abortion after the legal cut-off point, it has been claimed.
    UK abortion providers, who supported the woman, denied she had flouted the legal deadline and warned the treatment she endured “should be unthinkable in a civilised society”, with “no conceivable” public interest in holding her.
    They added that the woman has been under investigation for a year and a half, but still not charged with any crime.
    Jonathan Lord, medical director of MSI Reproductive Choices, one of the UK’s leading abortion providers, told The Independent the woman unexpectedly delivered a stillborn foetus at home that was about 24 weeks old.
    Dr Lord, the co-chair of the British Society of Abortion Care Providers, who shared the woman’s story with The Independent, said: “She was shocked to give birth due to not knowing how far along pregnant she was. She was admitted to hospital.
    “Because healthcare colleagues were suspicious, and knew she had been in touch with us, an abortion provider, as she told them, they suspected her of having an illegal abortion and called the police. But she wasn’t over the limit for a legal abortion.
    Dr Lord said the experience of having an “extraordinarily unexpected” stillbirth before being taken into police custody during lockdown was “traumatic” and “distressing” for the woman.
    Read full story
    Source: The Independent, 5 July 2022
  13. Patient Safety Learning
    A woman who suffered six miscarriages lost her seventh baby after doctors delayed her caesarean section, a report has found.
    Chyril Hutchinson was admitted to hospital in February 2021 with high blood pressure when she was 37 weeks pregnant with her daughter Ceniyah Cienna Carter, and was told by doctors at Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust she would need a caesarean.
    But the procedure was delayed as a result of staffing pressures and because Ms Hutchinson’s blood pressure stabilised. She was then told she would have to wait another two weeks for it to be carried out.
    Given her previous miscarriages, Ms Hutchinson said she pleaded for her baby to be delivered earlier, but her concerns were “dismissed” and she was sent home. Days later, a scan revealed that her baby had died.
    A trust investigation into Ms Hutchinson’s care found that staff had failed to properly monitor the growth of her baby, which could have indicated the need for an earlier delivery.
    The internal report, seen by The Independent, also revealed that on the day Ms Hutchinson was told she should have a casaerean, the hospital was six midwives short and the department was busy - a situation the trust said “places additional pressures and possible overload on medical staff”.
    However, the report concluded that staffing levels did not affect Ms Hutchinson’s care, and it did not state whether the wider failings had led directly to her child being stillborn.
    Read full story
    Source: The Independent, 5 June 2022
  14. Patient Safety Learning
    "Seeing how much pain she's in is killing me," the mother of a woman waiting four years for a hip operation has said.
    It is only by screaming that Marie Morgan, from Carmarthenshire, can express her level of suffering.
    The 30-year-old, who has multiple brain conditions, can speak only a few words and needs round-the-clock care. 
    "Her hip is out and is rubbing against bone... there's no socket there," Marie's mother Sandra said. "She can't travel because every time I move her she's screaming in pain.
    Marie has cerebral palsy, severe epilepsy and fluid on the brain and the constant agony caused by the wait has meant these conditions, including her seizures, have become "horrendous".
    Sandra said: "She used to be so happy, we used to go to the pool, play music... Now she's gone downhill. I don't think she can last much longer to be honest with you."
    Marie, from Penygroes, is on a waiting list to have surgery in Morriston Hospital, Swansea.
    Her mother said staff have told her she is considered to be high priority, but despite her best efforts, she is still in the dark about when the operation will happen.
    "They said because of Covid they weren't operating, now they say it's staff shortages so it's something all the time.
    "I feel I'm knocking my head against a wall. It's not fair, she's only 30 and suffering the way she is."
    Swansea Bay Health Board said it hoped to tackle the backlog by increasing capacity at one of its hospitals.
    Read full story
    Source: BBC News, 17 February 2022
  15. Patient Safety Learning
    A London hospital has launched an investigation after a woman whose baby died in the womb had to deliver her son at home due to lack of beds and keep his remains in her fridge when A&E staff said they could not store them safely.
    Laura Brody and her partner, Lawrence, said they were “tipped into hell” after being sent home by university hospital Lewisham to await a bed when told their baby no longer had a heartbeat but no beds were immediately available to give birth, the BBC reported.
    Two days later, after waking up in severe pain, Brody, who was four months into her pregnancy, gave birth in agony on the toilet in their bathroom. “And it was then,” she told the broadcaster, “I saw it was a boy”.
    The couple, who wanted investigative tests to be carried out at a later time, dialled 999 but were told it was not an emergency. They wrapped their baby’s remains in a wet cloth, placed him in a Tupperware box, and went to A&E where they were told to wait in the general waiting room, they said.
    She was eventually taken into a bay and told she would require surgery to remove the placenta. But, with the waiting room hot and stuffy and staff refusing to store the remains or even look inside the Tupperware box, they decided as it got to midnight they had no option but for her partner to take their baby’s remains home.
    Brody said the whole experience “felt so grotesque”.
    “When things go wrong with pregnancy there are not the systems in place to help you, even with all the staff and their experts – and they are working really hard – the process is so flawed that it just felt like we had been tipped into hell,” she told Radio 4’s Today programme.
    The case is said to have raised wider concerns among campaigners who argue that miscarriage care needs to be properly prioritised within hospitals including A&E.
    Read full story
    Source: The Guardian, 30 May 2022
  16. Patient Safety Learning
    An 18-year-old woman suffering a mental health crisis was forced to wait eight-and-a-half days in A&E before getting a bed in a psychiatric hospital – believed to be the longest such wait seen in the NHS.
    Louise (not her real name) had to be looked after by the police and security guards and sleep in a chair and on a mattress of the floor in the A&E at St Helier hospital in Sutton, south London, because no bed was available in a mental health facility.
    She became increasingly “dejected, despairing and desperate” as her ordeal continued and, her mental health worsening while she waited, self-harmed by banging her head off a wall. She absconded twice because she did not know when she would finally start inpatient treatment.
    Louise arrived at St Helier on the evening of  Thursday 16 June and did not get a bed in an NHS psychiatric unit until the early hours of Saturday 25 June, more than eight days later. She was diagnosed last year with emotionally unstable personality disorder and ADHD.
    The mental health charity Mind said it believed it to be the longest wait in A&E ever endured by someone experiencing a mental health crisis, and described it as “unacceptable, disgraceful and dangerous”. It called for urgent action to tackle the inadequacy of NHS mental health provision and bed numbers.
    “An eight-and-a-half day wait in A&E for a mental health bed is both unacceptable and disgraceful. Mind has never heard of a patient in crisis waiting this long to receive the care they need, and serious questions need to be raised as to how anyone – let alone an 18-year-old – was left to suffer for so long without the care she needs,” said Rheian Davies, the head of Mind’s legal unit.
    “This is dangerous for staff, who are not trained to give the acute care the patient needs, and dangerous for the patient, who needs that care immediately – not over a week later."
    Read full story
    Source: The Guardian, 4 July 2022
  17. Patient Safety Learning
    A woman has described how she spent more than six hours of her 100th birthday waiting in agony for an ambulance after slipping and fracturing her pelvis while getting ready for a family lunch.
    Irene Silsby was due to be picked up by her niece, Lynne Taylor, for a celebration to mark her centenary on 9 April. But she fell in the windowless bathroom of her care home in Greetham, Rutland, and staff called an ambulance at 9am after she managed to summon help.
    “All I remember is I was in terrible pain,” said Silsby from her hospital bed on Saturday. When asked of the ambulance delay, she said: “It’s disgusting. I don’t know how I stood it so long, the pain was so severe.”
    Taylor expected to meet the ambulance as she arrived 45 minutes later. But when she reached the care home, the manager said it would be a 10-hour wait, she said.
    What was to be her aunt’s first trip outside the care home in more than five months turned into her lying on a cold floor surrounded by pillows and blankets to keep her warm and quell some of the discomfort.
    Taylor, 60, recalled her aunt saying: “They’re not coming to me because they know I’m 100 and I’m not really worth it any more.”
    Taylor said she had never felt so scared, frustrated and worried. After calling 999 and expressing her outrage, she was told that life-threatening conditions were being prioritised.
    “I thought she was going to die,” she said. “I didn’t think that any frail, tiny, 100-year-old body could put up with that level of pain on the floor.”
    Read full story
    Source: The Guardian, 20 April 2022
  18. Patient Safety Learning
    Every week for nearly a year, Lorraine Shilcock attended an hour-long counselling session paid for by the NHS.
    She needed the therapy, which ended in November, to cope with the terrifying nightmares that would wake her five or six times a night, and the haunting daytime flashbacks. Lorraine, 67, a retired textile worker from Desford, Leicester, has post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Her psychological scars due to a routine NHS medical check, which was supposed to help her, not leave her suffering.
    In October 2018, Lorraine had a hysteroscopy, a common procedure to inspect the womb in women who have heavy or abnormal bleeding. The 30-minute procedure, performed in an outpatient clinic, is considered so routine that many women are told it will be no worse than a smear test and that, if they are worried about the pain, they can take a couple of paracetamol or ibuprofen immediately beforehand.
    Yet for Lorraine, and potentially thousands more women in the UK, that could not be further from the truth.
    Many who have had a hysteroscopy say the pain was the worst they have ever experienced, ahead of childbirth, broken bones, or even a ruptured appendix, commonly regarded as the most agonising medical emergency.
    Yet most had no warning it would be so traumatic, leaving some, like Lorraine, with long-term consequences. But, crucially, it is entirely avoidable.
    Do you have an experience you would like to share? Join our conversation on the hub on painful hysteroscopy. We are using this feedback and evidence to help campaign for safer, harm-free care.
    Read full story
    Source: Mail Online, 3 March 2020
  19. Patient Safety Learning
    A woman spent “four hours watching her mother dying on the floor waiting for an ambulance in a journey that should take just ten minutes”, the Irish Oireachtas Health Committee was told today.
    Committee deputy chairman Sean Crowe said the “woman died on her way to hospital”.
    Her bereaved daughter was left with the memory of her mother “gasping for breath”, he told Health Minister Stephen Donnelly.
    He said ambulance delays, compounded by them having to wait backed up for hours outside hospitals because of a lack of trolleys in emergency departments, were leading to serious consequences.
    In response the minister said: “The national ambulance service needs significant additional funding and that is happening now.”
    He said there is work under way to rebuild ambulance bases as well as add to the fleet, along with hiring more advanced paramedics.
    He added: “We need to recognise response times from ambulances are not where they need to be and vary around the country. It is not yet where it needs to be and some areas are worse than others.”
    Read full story
    Source: Independent Ireland, 30 November 2022
  20. Patient Safety Learning
    A woman who suffered traumatic complications from a vaginal mesh implant has been awarded a record settlement of at least £1m from the NHS.
    Yvette Greenway-Mansfield, 59, was given a mesh implant at Coventry’s University Hospital in 2009 and went on to suffer serious complications. Her medical negligence claim against the hospital trust found that the surgery was carried out prematurely and unnecessarily and that her consent form had been doctored to include additional risks after Greenway-Mansfield had signed it.
    Greenway-Mansfield said that being awarded the compensation was a “huge relief”, but added that many other women who have suffered similar damage had received little or no compensation, and criticised the government’s failure to establish a financial redress agency for victims.
    “I’m not the only one. There are thousands of mes,” she said. “There should be a pot of money to provide damages for these women and a care plan in place as an automatic response to mesh-damaged people. It comes down to a perception of women and women’s health problems. We’ve all had enough of it.”
    Read full story
    Source: The Guardian, 13 November 2023
  21. Patient Safety Learning
    Patients needing urgent care may be sent to the unit closest to their homes under new rules, the Manchester Evening News revealed.
    Hospital bosses admitted the ‘protocol’ after one patient, suffering horrific burns, reported being sent away from two hospitals before receiving any care.
    The Northern Care Alliance NHS Group has introduced the directive as part of a ‘reconfiguration of services across Greater Manchester’, saying that patients will be sent to the 'most appropriate place for their needs', 'closest to their home', in the 'quickest time possible'.
    However, anyone needing care for emergency and life-threatening conditions can still go to their nearest A&E department for treatment, hospital chiefs have stressed.
    The group operates Salford Royal Hospital, the Royal Oldham Hospital, Fairfield General Hospital, and Rochdale Infirmary, among other local care services.
    The instructions come as a 64-year-old woman from Norden in Rochdale suffered with severe burns after accidentally tipping scalding water on herself while on holiday in Northumberland.
    The woman - a former nurse of more than 30 years - was unable to treat the burns alone, and she returned home with her husband, immediately attending Rochdale Infirmary's Urgent Care Centre.
    Noting that there would be a 'five-and-a-half hour wait' for urgent care, a staff member sent the patient to Fairfield General's Accident and Emergency Department in Bury, she says.
    Read full story
    Source: Evening Manchester News, 29 September 2021
  22. Patient Safety Learning
    A woman described as a "high risk" anorexia patient faced delays in treatment after moving to university, an inquest has heard.
    Madeline Wallace, 18, from Cambridgeshire, was told there could be a six-week delay in her seeing a specialist after moving to Edinburgh.
    The student "struggled" while at university and a coroner said there appeared to be a "gap" in her care. Ms Wallace died on 9 January 2018 due to complications from sepsis.
    A parliamentary health service ombudsman report into her death was being written at the time of Ms Wallace's treatment in 2017 and issues raised included moving from one provider to another and higher education.
    Coroner Sean Horstead said Ms Wallace only had one dietician meeting in three months, despite meal preparation and planning being an area of anxiety she had raised.
    Dr Hazel said she had tried to make arrangements with the Cullen Centre in Edinburgh in April 2017 but had been told to call back in August. The Cullen Centre said it could only accept her as a patient after she registered with a GP and that an appointment could take up to six weeks from that point.
    Read full story
    Source: BBC News, 10 February 2020
  23. Patient Safety Learning
    A woman says she was forced to pay around £25,000 for private healthcare to treat endometriosis after her symptoms were “overlooked” for eight years.
    Aneka Hindocha, 34, started voicing her concerns about painful periods when she was aged 25 but says she was initially told by doctors this was normal.
    Ms Hindocha, who described the pain of endometriosis as “someone ripping your insides out”, says the condition should have been diagnosed sooner but argued women’s pain often gets overlooked and ignored.
    Endometriosis is a very common chronic inflammatory condition, impacting an estimated 1.5 million women in the UK. An inquiry by the All-Party Political Group found that like Ms Hindocha, it takes an average of eight years to get a diagnosis.
    The condition sees tissue comparable to womb-lining grow in other places in the body - with symptoms often debilitating and spanning from infertility to painful periods, tiredness, pain while having sex, as well as depression and anxiety.
    “I was told painful periods were normal, which they are not, but I believed that at the time,” Ms Hindocha told The Independent. “I thought the issue was me. I thought I was being a hypochondriac.”
    Her health massively deteriorated in the summer of 2020 and she became bedbound for three days.
    “I needed someone to find out what was wrong with me,“ Ms Hindocha added. “I was crying I was in so much pain.”
    She says that two years later she still had not received her laparoscopy despite the fact her pain was getting more severe and so she ended up paying for a private scan. She finally got diagnosed with stage 4 endometriosis a week later.
    “By the time of having my surgery at the end of February 2022, it had been nearly two years on the NHS waiting list and I was still being told to wait.”
    Read full story
    Source: The Independent, 18 October 2022
  24. Patient Safety Learning
    A woman said she has been unable to get her ADHD medication for months.
    Hannah Huxford, 49, from Grimsby is one of thousands of patients unable to get hold of medicine to manage their symptoms due to a national shortage.
    Mrs Huxford, who was diagnosed with the condition two years ago, described the situation as a "huge worry".
    The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said it had taken action to improve the supply of medicines but added that "some challenges remain".
    Mrs Huxford said the medicine made a "huge difference" and got her life back on track.
    "It enables me to function and concentrate so I can be more proactive, I can be more productive," she explained.
    She said she had been unable to get her usual supply since October 2023 and has to ration what she can get hold of.
    "Christmas time it was just getting beyond a joke. I was going back to the pharmacy, probably two or three times in a month, just to collect the little IOUs and it was getting to the point where that, in itself, was becoming a stress," she said.
    "All of a sudden, if this medication is taken away from me, I'm frightened that I will go back to not being able to cope."
    James Davies, from the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, said the supply shortage has been caused by manufacturing problems and an increase in demand.
    "There are more people who are being diagnosed with ADHD, more people seeking to access ADHD treatments. That's not just related to the UK, this is a global problem," he said.
    Mr Davies said some ADHD medication has come back into stock but added "it's quite a fluid situation at the moment".
    Read full story
    Source: BBC News, 19 February 2024
    Have you (or a loved one) ever been prescribed medication that you were then unable to get hold of at the pharmacy? 
    To help us understand how these issues impact the lives of patients and families, please share your experience and insights in our community thread on the topic: 
     
    You'll need to register with the hub first, its free and easy to do. 
    We would also like to hear from pharmacists working in community or hospital settings, and others who have insights to share on this issue. What barriers and challenges have you seen around medication availability? Is there anything that can be done to improve wider systems or processes?
  25. Patient Safety Learning
    A 33-year-old woman says she's been suffering awful coronavirus symptoms for six months and says it's "ruined her life".
    Stephanie, from London, says her symptoms began in mid-March when she started experiencing loss of taste and smell, body aches, headaches, a fever, shivering, hot and cold sweats, and sickness. But six months later she still has had no sense of taste and smell, she suffers brain fog and chronic fatigue and says just walking across her flat leaves her chest feeling tight.
    The photographer, who lives alone, says she sleeps for 10-12 hours but is still always tired. "I'm only 33," she said.
    Stephanie wants to raise awareness of 'long Covid' and says more research needs to be done on how to treat the long-term effects of the disease.
    She said she's scared she'll 'never be the same again'.
    Stephanie says she has a hospital appointment on Friday to have tests on her lungs and heart as doctors are concerned she has lung damage.
    She added: "I think some people don't believe in long Covid, so I want to raise awareness of what people are going through. We need more research of how to treat people with long Covid because there isn't much available, it's so awful."
    Read full story
    Source: Mirror, 1 October 2020
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