Hundreds of NHS patients were harmed last year by errors so serious they are never supposed to happen. New figures show there were 403 of these so-called never events over the course of the year, a total that works out at more than one every single day. The scale of the number has drawn fresh attention to patient safety across the health service.
Never events are defined as patient safety incidents that are so serious they should never occur, precisely because they are considered entirely preventable. They are not ordinary complications or unavoidable risks, but failures that established procedures are meant to stop before they reach the patient. That distinction is part of what makes the annual figure so striking.
Among the most alarming examples are operations carried out on the wrong part of the body. In such cases a procedure is performed on the incorrect site, an error that the safety checks built into modern surgery are specifically designed to rule out. These mistakes are among the most serious failures that can happen in an operating theatre.
Other never events involve objects being left inside patients after procedures. The figures include surgical swabs and gloves being left behind, as well as surgical instruments remaining inside the body once an operation is over. Each of these requires further intervention to put right and can cause lasting harm to the person involved.
A further category concerns the wrong device being used. In some instances patients received the wrong implant or prosthesis, including those relating to hip replacements and other parts of the body. Fitting the incorrect component can mean additional surgery and a longer, more difficult recovery for the patient.
In response, the NHS has stressed that incidents like these are extremely rare. It says that when a never event does occur, the trust involved is required to investigate what happened and to take effective steps to learn from it and make improvements. For the patients affected, however, the reassurance that such events are uncommon offers little comfort once the harm has already been done.