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Found 1,491 results
  1. News Article
    A new pregnancy screening tool cuts the risk of baby loss among women from black, Asian and ethnic minority backgrounds to the same level as white women, research suggests. The app calculates a woman's individual risk of pregnancy problems. In a study of 20,000 pregnant women, baby death rates in ethnic groups were three times lower than normal when the tool was used. Experts say the new approach can help reduce health inequalities. The screening tool is already in use at St George's Hospital in London and is being tried out at three other maternity units in England, with hopes it could be rolled out to 20 centres within two years. Researchers from Tommy's National Centre for Maternity Improvement, led by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the Royal College of Midwives, developed the new tool. Professor Basky Thilaganathan, who led the research team at St George's Hospital, said the new approach could "almost eliminate a large source of the healthcare inequality facing black, Asian and minority ethnic pregnant women". "We can personalise care for you and reduce the chances of having a small baby, pre-eclampsia and losing your baby," he said. The current system of a tick-box checklist to assess pregnancy risk has been around for 70 years, and is limited. The new digital tool, which uses an algorithm to calculate a woman's personal risk, can detect high-risk women more accurately and prevent complications in pregnancy, the researchers say. Both pregnant women and maternity staff can upload information on their pregnancy and how they are feeling to the app during antenatal appointments and at other times. Dr Edward Morris, president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, said it was "unacceptable" that black, Asian and minority ethnic women faced huge inequalities on maternity outcomes. "The digital tool provides a practical way to support women with personalised care during pregnancy and make informed decisions about birth. Read full story Read Tommy's press release Source: BBC News, 28 February 2022
  2. News Article
    The death of a "vulnerable" transgender teenager who struggled to get help was preventable, a coroner has said. Daniel France, 17, was known to Cambridgeshire County Council and Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Foundation Trust (CPFT) when he took his own life on 3 April 2020. The coroner said his death showed a "dangerous gap" between services. When he died, Mr France was in the process of being transferred from children and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) in Suffolk to adult services in Cambridgeshire. The First Response Service, which provides help for people experiencing a mental health crisis, also assessed Mr France but he had been considered not in need of urgent intervention, the coroner's report said. Cambridgeshire County Council had received two safeguarding referrals for Daniel, in October 2019 and January 2020, but had closed both. "It was accepted that the decision to close both referrals was incorrect", Mr Barlow said in his report. Mr Barlow wrote in his report, sent to both the council and CPFT: "My concern in this case is that a vulnerable young person can be known to the county council and [the] mental health trust and yet not receive the support they need pending substantive treatment." He highlighted Daniel was "repeatedly assessed as not meeting the criteria for urgent intervention" but that waiting lists for phycological therapy could mean more than a year between asking for help and being given it. "That gap between urgent and non-urgent services is potentially dangerous for a vulnerable young person, where there is a chronic risk of an impulsive act," Mr Barlow said. Read full story Source: BBC News, 25 February 2022
  3. News Article
    Pregnancy-related deaths among US mothers climbed higher in the pandemic’s first year, continuing a decades-long trend that disproportionately affects Black people, according to a new government report. Overall in 2020, there were almost 24 deaths per 100,000 births, or 861 deaths total, numbers that reflect mothers dying during pregnancy, childbirth or the year after. The rate was 20 per 100,000 in 2019. Among Black people, there were 55 maternal deaths per 100,000 births, almost triple the rate for white people. The report from the National Center for Health Statistics does not include reasons for the trend and researchers said they have not fully examined how Covid-19, which increases risks for severe illness in pregnancy, might have contributed. The coronavirus could have had an indirect effect. Many people put off medical care early in the pandemic for fear of catching the virus, and virus surges strained the healthcare system, which could have had an impact on pregnancy-related deaths, said Eugene Declercq, a professor and maternal death researcher at Boston University School of Public Health. He called the high rates “terrible news” and noted that the US has continually fared worse in maternal mortality than many other developed countries. Reasons for those disparities are not included in the data, but experts have blamed many factors including differences in rates of underlying health conditions, poor access to quality healthcare and structural racism. Read full story Source: The Guardian, 23 February 2022
  4. News Article
    Next month, a report will be published into one of the biggest scandals in the history of the NHS, the failures of maternity care at the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust. The BBC's Michael Buchanan who helped uncover the problems examines why so many failures were allowed to happen for so long. Kayleigh Griffiths' baby, Pippa, died at 31 hours old. The cause of death, the couple were later told, was an infection - Group B Strep. The Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust told the family they would carry out an investigation. But after several weeks of silence, Kayleigh contacted the trust to be told it was an internal investigation and the couple's input wouldn't be required. Kayleigh, an NHS auditor at a different trust, feared the truth was being hidden from her. That's when she decided to send the email to Rhiannon Davies, whose baby, Kate, also died at the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust As the bond between the mothers deepened, their conversations morphed into something else. Armed with little more than a gnawing suspicion, they started to scour the internet, coroner's records and death notices to see if any other families had received poor maternity care at the Shropshire trust. They collated 23 cases dating back to 2000 - including stillbirths, neonatal deaths, maternal deaths and babies born with brain injuries. Appalled by what they had found, they wrote to the then health secretary Jeremy Hunt in December 2016, asking him to order an investigation. He agreed and in May 2017, senior midwife Donna Ockenden was appointed to lead the review. One of the themes the inquiry has already noted, in an interim report published in December 2020, is that in many cases the trust failed to investigate after something went wrong, or simply carried out its own inquiry. Panorama has discovered the trust even developed its own investigation system, what they called a High Risk Case Review. It was outside any national framework that has been used to help learn lessons from incidents and doesn't appear to be a system that's used in any other NHS organisation. Another consequence of the unorthodox system was that fewer incidents were reported to NHS regulators, limiting the opportunity to learn lessons. One of the earliest cases on the original list of 23 compiled by the two couples was the death of Kathryn Leigh in 2000. Panorama has investigated the case and discovered that a theme identified almost two decades ago was to come up repeatedly in subsequent incidents. The publication of the final report by Donna Ockenden next month will be a watershed moment in the history of the NHS - the revelation of multiple instances of maternity failures in a rural corner of England. Pippa Griffiths and Kate Stanton-Davies lived fewer than 40 hours between them, but their legacy, in terms of improved maternity care, could last decades. Read full story Source: BBC News, 23 February 2022 Source:
  5. News Article
    A diabetic pensioner died on the roof of a hospital after staff physically ejected him despite being in a “confused” state. Stephen McManus, a long-term Type 1 diabetes patient, had earlier been rushed to Charing Cross Hospital in west London while suffering a hypoglycaemic episode. Despite colleagues having expressed concerns about his slurred speech and erratic behaviour, a junior doctor decided the 60-year-old had the mental capacity to go home. He was wheeled out of the building by security guards, despite having no phone, money and being in his slippers. His family had not been contacted to inform them he was being discharged. Some time later Mr McManus re-entered the building and managed to gain access to a construction area, somehow finding his way onto the roof. He was found dead the next morning following a police search after his family reported him missing. An inquest has begun trying to establish why Stephen was allowed to leave the hospital in the first place and how he was able to access a potentially dangerous zone. Mr McManus’s family say the case raises profound questions about the treatment of diabetic patients in the NHS. “My father was an extremely vulnerable patient and the nature of his removal from the hospital is inexplicable, Jonathan McManus, his son, told The Telegraph. “Had he been kept in hospital he would no doubt be alive today.” Read full story Source: Yahoo News, 19 February 2022
  6. News Article
    The NHS has abandoned targets that encouraged hospitals to pursue “normal births”, over fears for the safety of mothers and babies. Maternity units were told in a letter to stop using caesarean section rates to assess their performance. It comes after repeated scandals in maternity units, blamed in part on a focus on pursuing natural births at the expense of safety. The letter from Jacqueline Dunkley-Bent, NHS England’s chief midwife, and Dr Matthew Jolly, the national clinical director for maternity, instructed “all maternity services to stop using total caesarean section rates as a means of performance management”. It added: “We are concerned by the potential for services to pursue targets that may be clinically inappropriate and unsafe in individual cases." A final report into the deaths of dozens of babies at the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust will be published next month. It is expected to be highly critical. The midwife leading the inquiry, Donna Ockenden, has said women “felt pressured to have a normal birth” at the trust, adding: “There was a multi-professional, not midwife-led, focus on normal birth pretty much at any cost.” Hayley Coates, 29, lost her son Kaylan after staff at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust ignored her pleas for a caesarean section in March 2018. A coroner ruled that neglect contributed to Kaylan’s death. He suffered a fractured skull when he was delivered with forceps and was starved of oxygen. Coates, a mother of three, said she welcomed the NHS England letter, adding: “I was just ignored when I asked multiple times for a caesarean section. I was told repeatedly: ‘You will have this baby naturally, you don’t want to go to theatre.’ If I had gone to theatre many hours before, my baby wouldn’t have died. They have a duty of care, and the mother’s wishes are supposed to be priority.” Read full story (paywalled) Source: The Times, 20 February 2022
  7. News Article
    A man who died from a mixed medication overdose might still be alive if the help his partner was "begging" for had been provided, a coroner said. Mental health patient Benjamin Stroud, 42, had been under the care of Essex Partnership University NHS Trust (EPUT) in the weeks before his death in March. Essex coroner Michelle Brown said in a post-inquest report that, despite "escalating psychosis", his care co-ordinator did not flag the case. Following an overdose of medication in February, his partner, a nurse, called for psychiatric intervention and despite "begging" for help, Mr Stroud's care co-ordinator did not make a referral to the multi-disciplinary team (MDT). Mr Stroud died at home on 19 March and was found surrounded by empty insulin pens and pain medication. In her prevention of future deaths report, the coroner said: "It was clear from [his partner's] account that she had been begging the care co-ordinator for Mr Stroud to have an appointment with the psychiatrist, which did not occur and, from the evidence of EPUT, it was clear that Mr Stroud's care co-ordinator did not make any referral to the MDT, despite his escalating psychosis." The coroner added that the issue of care co-ordinators failing to document their reasons for not referring cases to the MDT had been raised at other inquests. "If these practices continue there is a real risk of future deaths occurring," Ms Brown warned. Paul Scott, chief executive at the trust, said: "We will continue to view all safety-related incidents as an opportunity to learn and make sure lessons are shared across the trust." Read full story Source: BBC News, 16 February 2022
  8. News Article
    A police investigation into allegations of cover-up and medical negligence over dozens of deaths at the Royal Sussex county hospital (RSCH) in Brighton has been expanded to include more recent cases, amid internal claims about dangerous surgery. In June the Guardian revealed that Sussex police were investigating the deaths of about 40 patients in the general surgery and neurosurgery departments at the RSCH. The force initially said the investigation, since named Operation Bramber, related to allegations of medical negligence in these departments between 2015 and 2020. It has now extended the scope of the investigation to more recent cases, amid internal allegations that the departments continue to be unsafe and fail to properly review serious incidents. An insider said the police should review what was considered to be an avoidable death after a procedure in July. The source said some of the surgeons remained a danger to the public. “You would not want your family members touched by these people,” they said. They added: “This is not a historic issue, it is ongoing. The same surgeons that were involved in previous problems remain in place.” They cited a woman who lost the power of speech in April after an alleged mistake in surgery to remove a brain tumour led to a stroke, and a man who was left with a brain abscess in May after being operated on despite a heightened risk of infection. Read full story Source: The Guardian, 13 September 2023
  9. News Article
    The mother of Martha Mills, whose preventable death in hospital has led to calls for extra patients' rights, has said she is to meet the health secretary to discuss "Martha's Rule". If introduced, it would give families a statutory right to get a second opinion if they have concerns about care. Merope Mills said patients needed more clarity and to feel empowered. Her daughter, Martha, died two years ago after failures in treating her sepsis at King's College Hospital. She had entered hospital with an injury to her pancreas after falling off her bike. The injury was serious but should never have been fatal. Within days she had died of sepsis. In an interview on Radio 4's Today programme, Mrs Mills said she had raised concerns but doctors told her the extensive bleeding was "a normal side-effect of the infection, that her clotting abilities were slightly off". The King's College Hospital Trust said it remained "deeply sorry that we failed Martha when she needed us most" and her parents should have been listened to. Read full story Source: BBC News, 12 September 2023
  10. News Article
    A coroner has strongly criticised a mental health trust for failing to investigate serious incidents promptly. Tees Esk and Wear Valleys Foundation Trust has been told that delays in probing serious incidents may “compromise the quality” of these investigations and hence “their value in preventing deaths”. The warnings, from Jeremy Chipperfield, senior coroner for County Durham and Darlington, come amid an ongoing inquest into the death of TEWV patient Ian Darwin. Mr Darwin died aged 42 in March, and the serious incident review into his death is still ongoing. A recently published prevention of future deaths report relating to Mr Darwin’s death said TEWV’s serious incident death investigations, “at all levels of seriousness, are routinely (if not invariably) significantly delayed and I understand there is no expectation of immediate, or any timetable for eventual rectification”. “In permitting delay of ‘serious incident’ investigations, TEWV may permit lethal hazard to persist for longer than necessary, and compromise the quality of such investigations and hence their value in preventing avoidable deaths.”
  11. News Article
    North East London Foundation Trust has been charged with corporate manslaughter – making it only the second NHS provider to be prosecuted for the crime. The Crown Prosecution Service has authorised the Metropolitan Police to bring a charge of corporate manslaughter against the mental health provider in regard to the death of Alice Figueiredo at the trust’s Goodmayes Hospital on 7 July 2015. Goodmayes ward manager Benjamin Aninakwa has also been charged with gross negligence manslaughter, and an offence under the Health and Safety at Work Act. The trust and Mr Aninakwa will appear at Barkingside Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday, 4 October. The prosecution follows a five year investigation by Met detectives. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 7 September 2023
  12. News Article
    A police investigation is to be launched into failings that led to dozens of baby deaths and injuries at a hospital trust. The maternity units at Nottingham University Hospitals (NUH) NHS Trust are already being examined in a review by senior midwife Donna Ockenden. The review will become the largest ever carried out in the UK, with about 1,800 families affected. Nottinghamshire Police said its decision to investigate followed discussions with Ms Ockenden. Her team is looking into failings that led to babies dying or being injured at Nottingham City Hospital and the Queen's Medical Centre. Chief Constable Kate Meynell said: "On Wednesday I met with Donna Ockenden to discuss her independent review into maternity cases of potentially significant concern at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust (NUH) and to build up a clearer picture of the work that is taking place. "We want to work alongside the review but also ensure that we do not hinder its progress. "However, I am in a position to say we are preparing to launch a police investigation. "I have appointed the Assistant Chief Constable, Rob Griffin, to oversee the preparations and the subsequent investigation." Read full story Source: BBC News, 7 September 2023
  13. News Article
    A father whose daughter died after travelling to Turkey for weight-loss surgery has urged people to think again before doing the same. Shannon Meenan Browse from Londonderry was 32 when she died in August. The mother-of-four travelled for a gastric sleeve operation 18 months ago but, according to her father, got sick almost straight away. The family were told she died in Altnagelvin Hospital from "malnutrition due to gastric sleeve". A BBC investigation in March found that seven British patients who travelled to Turkey for weight-loss surgery died after operations there, while others returned home with serious health issues. One of the UK's leading bariatric surgeons, Prof David Kerrigan said people are taking a "massive risk" by travelling abroad for weight-loss surgery. In the UK, he said, patients undergo a rigorous preparatory process that includes a psychological assessment and there is "a proper after-care programme". Read full story Source: BBC News, 6 September 2023
  14. News Article
    Dozens of young autistic people have died after serious failings in their care despite repeated warnings from coroners, BBC News has found. Their investigation found issues that were flagged a decade ago are still being warned about now. Two bereaved mothers said lessons had not been learned by their local health authority after the deaths of their teenage sons, two years apart. The coroner who oversaw both cases, noted a repeated failure in care. After the first death, the coroner criticised NHS Kent and Medway for "inadequate support" and said a similar incident may happen if this continued. Two years later, the second autistic teenager died under the care of the same authority. The same coroner found that had the victim received the recommended level of care, he might have got the therapy he needed. In the first piece of research of its kind, the BBC combed through more than 4,000 Prevention of Future Death (PFD) notices delivered in England and Wales over the past 10 years. Read full story Source: BBC News, 7 September 2023
  15. News Article
    Top boss of NHS complaints in England has told the BBC he wants Martha's rule to be introduced to give patients the power to get an automatic second medical opinion about hospital care, when they think things are going wrong. Rob Behrens said he had been moved by the plea of Merope Mills, who shared the story of her daughter's death. Martha was 13 when she died from sepsis. Merope Mills wants hospitals around the country to bring in Martha's rule, which would give parents, carers and patients the right to call for an urgent second clinical opinion from other experts at the same hospital, if they have concerns about their current care. It is something that Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman Rob Behrens fully supports. He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "Along with many others, I was moved and in great admiration for what Merope has said and done and I give unambiguous support. "Unfortunately, as tragic as this case is, it's not the first and there have been many cases where patients have been failed by their doctors because they haven't been listened to." Read full story Source: BBC News, 5 September 2023
  16. News Article
    Tonjanic Hill was overjoyed in 2017 when she learned she was 14 weeks pregnant. Despite a history of uterine fibroids, she never lost faith that she would someday have a child. But, just five weeks after confirming her pregnancy she seemed unable to stop urinating. She didn’t realize her amniotic fluid was leaking. Then came the excruciating pain. “I ended up going to the emergency room,” said Hill, now 35. “That’s where I had the most traumatic, horrible experience ever.” An ultrasound showed she had lost 90% of her amniotic fluid. Yet, over the angry protestations of her nurse, Hill said, the attending doctor insisted Hill be discharged and see her own OB-GYN the next day. The doctor brushed off her concerns, she said. The next morning, her OB-GYN’s office rushed her back to the hospital. But she lost her baby. Black women are less likely than women from other racial groups to carry a pregnancy to term — and in Harris County, where Houston is located, when they do, their infants are about twice as likely to die before their 1st birthday as those from other racial groups. Black fetal and infant deaths are part of a continuum of systemic failures that contribute to disproportionately high Black maternal mortality rates. “This is a public health crisis as it relates to Black moms and babies that is completely preventable,” said Barbie Robinson, who took over as executive director of Harris County Public Health in March 2021. “When you look at the breakdown demographically — who’s disproportionately impacted by the lack of access — we have a situation where we can expect these horrible outcomes.” Read full story Source: KFF Health News, 24 August 2023
  17. News Article
    More than 120,000 people in England died last year while on the NHS waiting list for hospital treatment, figures obtained by Labour appear to show. That would be a record high number of such deaths, and is double the 60,000 patients who died in 2017/18. For example, the Royal Free hospital in London said it had had 3,615 such deaths, while there were 2,888 at the Morecambe Bay trust in Cumbria and 2,039 at Leeds teaching hospitals trust. Hospital bosses said the deaths highlighted the dangers of patients having to endure long waits for care and reflected a “decade of underinvestment” that had left the NHS with too few staff and beds. Healthwatch England, a patient advocacy group that scrutinises NHS performance, said the number of people dying while waiting for care was “a national tragedy”. Louise Ansari, the chief executive, said: “We know that delays to care have significant impacts on people’s lives, putting many in danger.” Read full story Source: The Guardian, 31 August 2023
  18. News Article
    The cost of living squeeze is a significant factor in some stillbirths, according to case reviews carried out in one of England’s most deprived areas. The review was undertaken in Bradford last year, and concluded: ”the current financial crisis is impacting on the ability of some women to attend essential antenatal appointments”. Missing these appointments was a factor in a range of maternity safety events, including stillbirths, it said. The researchers are now calling for new national funding to help ensure expectant parents do not miss important appointments because they cannot afford to attend. The research findings include: ‘Did not attend’ rates increased due to lack of funds for transport to antenatal appointments; “Lack of credit on phones prevented communication between women and maternity services, for example, making [them] unable to rearrange scans or appointments”; Wide spread incidence of “digital poverty, [for example] a lady with type 1 [diabetes] was unable to monitor her glycaemic control over night due to only having one phone charger in the house”; and “Families with babies on a neonatal unit going without food in order to finance transport to and from the unit.” Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 25 August 2023
  19. News Article
    A critical report into how a mental health trust mismanaged its mortality figures was edited to remove criticism of its leadership, the BBC has found. In June, auditors Grant Thornton revealed how the Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust (NSFT) had lost track of patient deaths. But earlier drafts included language around governance failures that were missing in the final version. NSFT and Grant Thornton said the changes were due to fact-checking. A number of drafts of the report were produced, with the first dated 23 February this year. The first version described "poor governance" in the way deaths data was managed, with governance also being called "weak" and "inadequate". But many of these critical words were missing from the report released to the public, with "governance" also being replaced with "controls", according to leaked documents. After losing her son Tim in 2014, Caroline Aldridge has been highlighting what she and others claimed had been the trust's undercounting of deaths. "I think people need to know what was removed and what was changed, because I suspect that the first report is a lot nearer to the truth," she said. Ms Aldridge added: "It takes all responsibility from governance, removing the words 'inadequate', 'poor', 'weak' governance, removing significant pieces of information that's not factual accuracy. "We cannot have people watering it [the report] down when it's about deaths." Read full story Source: BBC News, 29 August 2023
  20. News Article
    The United States is in the middle of a maternal health crisis. Today, a woman in the US is twice as likely to die from pregnancy than her mother was a generation ago. Statistics from the World Health Organization show the United States has one of the highest rates of maternal death in the developed world. Women in the US are 10 or more times likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than mothers in Poland, Spain or Norway. Some of the worst statistics come out of the South - in places like Louisiana, where deep pockets of poverty, health care deserts and racial biases have long put mothers at risk. Dr Rebekah Gee: The state of maternal health in the United States is abysmal. And Louisiana is the highest maternal mortality in the US. So, in the developed world, Louisiana has the worst outcomes for women having babies." A third of Louisiana's parishes are maternal health deserts – meaning they don't have a single OB-GYN, leaving more than 51 thousand women in the state without easy access to care and three times more likely to die of pregnancy related causes. Read full story Source: CBS News, 20 August 2023
  21. News Article
    Lucy Letby sat with her parents in a meeting with senior managers at the Countess of Chester Hospital, where she worked, waiting patiently for an apology. She had prepared a statement that was read out by her parents to Tony Chambers, the hospital’s chief executive, about being bullied and victimised on the neonatal unit. It was December 22, 2016, and for the previous 18 months, two doctors on the unit had been trying to find an answer for a series of mysterious deaths of babies. Their detective work had led them to a single common denominator: Letby. The neonatal nurse had been on shift for each of the incidents. Rumours of a killer on the ward had spread and Letby had complained about the doctors and their finger-pointing, claiming she was being wrongly blamed. Chambers, who had trained as a nurse, was convinced by Letby’s account, and in front of her parents, John and Susan, offered sincere apologies on behalf of the hospital trust. The doctors in question would be “dealt with’’. Except the doctors were right. By that point Letby had secretly murdered seven babies and tried to kill six more, one of them twice. An investigation by The Sunday Times, based on a cache of internal documents, reveals in detail how the hospital delayed calling the police for months and that senior management, including the board, sided with Letby against doctors after commissioning perfunctory investigations. Read full story (paywalled) Source: The Times, 19 August 2023
  22. News Article
    In September last year, Ebrima Sajnia watched helplessly as his young son slowly died in front of his eyes. Mr Sajnia says three-year-old Lamin was set to start attending nursery school in a few weeks when he got a fever. A doctor at a local clinic prescribed medicines, including a cough syrup. Over the next few days, Lamin's condition deteriorated as he struggled to eat and even urinate. He was admitted to a hospital, where doctors detected kidney issues. Within seven days, Lamin was dead. He was among around 70 children - younger than five - who died in The Gambia of acute kidney injuries between July and October last year after consuming one of four cough syrups made by an Indian company called Maiden Pharmaceuticals. In October, the World Health Organization (WHO) linked the deaths to the syrups, saying it had found "unacceptable" levels of toxins in the medicines. A Gambian parliamentary panel also concluded after investigations that the deaths were the result of the children ingesting the syrups. Both Maiden Pharmaceuticals and the Indian government have denied this - India said in December that the syrups complied with quality standards when tested domestically. It's an assessment that Amadou Camara, chairperson of the Gambian panel that investigated the deaths, strongly disagrees with. "We have evidence. We tested these drugs. [They] contained unacceptable amounts of ethylene glycol and diethylene glycol, and these were directly imported from India, manufactured by Maiden," he says. Ethylene glycol and diethylene glycol are toxic to humans and could be fatal if consumed". Read full story Source: BBC News, 21 August 2023
  23. News Article
    More than 3,000 patients have died following incidents in the Irish health service since 2018, new data shows. New HSE data shows more than 480,000 incidents potentially causing harm were recorded across hospitals and community healthcare groups since 2018. These include falls, attacks on patients or staff, problems with medication, treating the wrong limb, or reactions to medical devices, among other issues. Last year’s total of 106,967 was the highest of five years recorded, up from 94,422 in 2018. While around half the incidents annually led to no injury, last year 0.65% or 556 led to a death. That stood at 0.59% or 557 deaths in 2018. A spokesperson for the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) said the figures are very high, but not surprising. “Hospitals are not supposed to be dangerous places," she said. "No matter how highly skilled your staff are, patient safety issues and the risk of missed care incidents are inevitable in a situation where patients are lining corridors on trolleys and there aren’t enough staff to care for them." Read full story Source: Irish Examiner, 18 August 2023
  24. News Article
    Nurse Lucy Letby has been found guilty of murdering seven babies on a neonatal unit, making her the UK's most prolific child serial killer in modern times. The 33-year-old has also been convicted of trying to kill six other infants at the Countess of Chester Hospital between June 2015 and June 2016. Letby deliberately injected babies with air, force fed others milk and poisoned two of the infants with insulin. Commenting on the verdict, Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman Rob Behrens said: “We know that, in general, people work in the health service because they want to help and that when things go wrong it is not intentional. At the same time, and too often we see the commitment to public safety in the NHS undone by a defensive leadership culture across the NHS. “The Lucy Letby story is different and almost without parallel, because it reveals an intent to harm by one individual. As such, it is one of the darkest crimes ever committed in our health service. Our first thoughts are with the families of the children who died. “However, we also heard throughout the trial, evidence from clinicians that they repeatedly raised concerns and called for action. It seems that nobody listened and nothing happened. More babies were harmed and more babies were killed. Those who lost their children deserve to know whether Letby could have been stopped and how it was that doctors were not listened to and their concerns not addressed for so long. Patients and staff alike deserve an NHS that values accountability, transparency, and a willingness to learn. “Good leadership always listens, especially when it’s about patient safety. Poor leadership makes it difficult for people to raise concerns when things go wrong, even though complaints are vital for patient safety and to stop mistakes being repeated. We need to see significant improvements to culture and leadership across the NHS so that the voices of staff and patients can be heard, both with regard to everyday pressures and mistakes and, very exceptionally, when there are warnings of real evil.”
  25. News Article
    A man died after A&E doctors sent him home from hospital and “told him to drink Lucozade” despite him vomiting 100 times in 24 hours. Nick Rousseau died from an undiagnosed blocked bowel in 2019 after doctors at Milton Keynes Hospital failed to spot that he had the life-threatening condition. The 47-year-old was sent home twice in three days and reassured he “would be alright” as doctors believed he had gastroenteritis, his “devastated” wife Kimberly White said. But Mr Rousseau was actually suffering from an ischaemic bowel, a condition which blocks the arteries to the bowel. He had been to see his doctors several times and had lost three stones in weight over two years due to vomiting and diarrhoea but was never diagnosed. His family, represented by Osbornes Law, received a six-figure payout in June from Milton Keynes University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. While it did not admit negligence, it accepted that there were features of Mr Rousseau’s illness which could have justified admission, inpatient observation, and further tests, which could have given a definitive diagnosis. Read full story Source: The Independent, 4 August 2023
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