Medical errors from Patient hospital wristbands
Almost 25,000 hospital patients were the victims of reported medical errors last year, leading to death and serious injury in some cases.
The National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA), which revealed the figures, has issued new guidelines on patient wristbands after more than 2,900 errors were attributed to cases of mistaken identity.
Hospitals in England and Wales currently use a variety of bands, with colours or codes meaning different things. Some hospitals even use handwritten tags.
Between February 2006 and January 2007, the NPSA received 24,382 reports of patients being mismatched with their care. It is estimated that more than 2,900 of these related to wristbands and their use.
The NPSA said these bands must now be standardised across the country in order to cut down on errors, which are thought to be widely under-reported in the NHS.
The mistakes reported the MPSA include patients being given the wrong medication, incorrect surgery, the wrong blood transfusion and incorrect tests. All of which, depending on the circumstances, all have potentially life-threatening consequences.
Up to 30,000 patients are estimated to die every year due to avoidable medical errors. But the true scale of the problem is largely unknown due to reluctance by NHS staff to report mistakes and near-misses.
The NPSA said that no further breakdown of the figures for last year was available. The agency, designed to collect data on patient safety, was criticised last year as "dysfunctional" by the Public Accounts Committee, because it had no idea how many patients died each year as a result of medical errors.
It subsequently reported that 41,000 medication mistakes had been recorded between July 2005 and July 2006, resulting in 36 deaths. A further 2,000 patients suffered "moderate or severe harm."
In 2005, the National Audit Office reported that nearly one million medical errors or safety lapses had occurred in the previous year, causing 2,000 deaths. Half of the incidents could have been avoided if staff had learnt from past mistakes, the auditor said.
Helen Glenister, spokesperson for the NPSA said: "We are issuing this advice to NHS organisations to encourage the standardisation of wristbands. This will help frontline staff, who work in different NHS hospitals across England and Wales to make patient care safer. "
"Wristbands are an important safety check in patient identification but do not take away the need for clinicians to check identification directly with patients. In cases where patients are unable to provide their own details because they are critically ill, unconscious, confused or cannot communicate, wristbands provide a vital backup."
The NPSA is recommending that all NHS acute organisations in England and Wales take immediate action to implement the advice detailed in the notice.
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