I’m not a doctor but even I know that a healthcare system that is aiming to be safe should have a list of incidents that should never happen, That list I believe should have on it removing the wrong limb during an operation. It’s a basic question for a surgeon or those preparing a patient for operation to ask themselves ‘is this the correct limb to be amputated?’
Unfortunately National Health Service (NHS) staff made that exact same mistake with six different patients, over a relatively short three year period and in only one hospital. Yes, you heard that correctly, one hospital managed to make a should never happen type of mistake six times in three years.
This is truly astounding incompetence from the NHS. It’s the sort of thing that you would expect to see in some sort of dark comedic satire about a failing state. Sadly this doesn’t surprise me as my late father told me that when he was in hospital for a knee operation the nurses marked up the wrong leg and it was only when my father pointed out this fact that they marked up the correct leg.
My Dad got off pretty lucky with his encounter with this sort of NHS incompetence but the patients who lost limbs due to NHS screw ups are not.
Metro Newspaper reported
A hospital has admitted to cutting six people’s limbs off by mistake in the past three years.
York and Scarborough Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust confirmed six patients had limbs amputated due to medical mistakes over a three year period.
This is the highest number of any NHS trust across the UK.
Four amputations were performed in 2020 and another two were carried out in 2021 at the Yorkshire hospital.
The article then went on to show a list of hospitals where limbs have been mistakenly amputated and it appears that this is not an uncommon problem in the UK National Health Service. The wrongful removal of limbs seems to be a countrywide thing and might even be worse than the list shows as the Metro article stated that not all NHS trusts disclosed information about negligent limb removal for patient confidentiality reasons. Here’s the list
Barnsley Hospital NHS Foundation Trust – Less than 10 amputations due to medical negligence.
Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust: Less than five
Harrogate and District NHS Foundation Trust: Less than five
Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust: Less than five
Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust: Less than five
Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust: Less than five
Royal United Hospitals Bath NHS Foundation Trust: 15 or fewer
Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust: Less than five
South Warwickshire NHS Foundation Trust: Less than five
Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust: Less than five
The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust: Less than 10
University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust: Less than five
University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust: Less than five
Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust: Between one and five
Wye Valley NHS Trust: Less than six
It’s important to remember that the ideal thing to happen in any healthcare system is that zero wrong limbs are removed, they are called ‘must never happen’ incidents for a reason, yet here we are with the NHS doing this a lot. It’s a basic competence for medical staff to know the correct limb to remove yet it is a competence that seems far removed from the world of our ‘sainted’ NHS.
