Quality & Patient Safety

England: Despite high number of mistakes, patients told not to worry

Patient Safety Monitor: Global Edition, April 28, 2009

Burton's Queen's Hospital has suffered 26 serious untoward incidents (SUIs) in the past year, which were among the more than 2,200 at 172 National Health Service (NHS) trusts in England, according toBurton Mail. The SUIs inlcude instances in which the patient suffers from severe harm. These cases also were part of the 4,000 mistakes due to lack of resources discovered by the Royal College of Nursing and Patients' Association.

"I would strongly dispute that at Burton, our SUIs have been far more about systems, processes, and the human error and the fact that, on occasions, things go wrong," Burton Queen Hospital Chief Executive Paula Clark told the Burton Mail. "When you look at the number of patients who come through our doors each year?about 250,000?this is a small number of cases, which we take very seriously."

Each incident was tracked and assigned to an executive director at Queen's, where each blunder helped to provide a lesson on how to prevent the likeliness of another occurrence, in turn helping to improve patient safety. Also, each incident was reported to South Staffordshire Primary Care Trust and West Midlands Strategic Health Authority.

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