The number of patients needing further treatment due to botched NHS operations has soared by more than 70 per cent in five years.
Mistakes include using dirty tools, cutting the wrong body part, and leaving equipment on patients’ bodies at the end of a procedure.
Patients needed extra care as a result of 23,997 such incidents last year, up 72.6 per cent from 13,903 in 2018/19, according to NHS England.
Trauma can cause people pain, delay recovery, and expose them to additional risk if procedures need to be repeated under general anesthesia.
Repeat surgery also requires valuable staff and theater time that could be used to eliminate waiting lists, which currently number 7.6 million.
Patients needed more care after surgeons accidentally cut the wrong part of their body on 19,174 occasions last year, making it the most common type of accident.
While “under the knife” these patients suffered what the NHS describes as an “involuntary cut, puncture, puncture or bleeding”.
The number of times doctors have treated a patient with these errors has nearly doubled in the last five years and increased 13 percent in the last year alone.
Mistakes include using dirty tools, cutting off the wrong body part and leaving equipment on victims’ bodies at the end of a procedure (file image)
Patients needed extra care as a result of 23,997 such incidents last year, up 72.6 per cent from 13,903 in 2018/19, according to NHS England (file image).
The figures show that most of these complications occur during surgery; However, some occur while patients are being evaluated with a flexible camera, known as an endoscopic examination.
NHS statistics show that more and more patients are coming out of sedation to discover that they have accidentally left pieces of equipment inside them or that they were operated on with equipment that had not been properly sterilized.
Others did not receive proper medication and suffered complications as a result.
The NHS says much of this rise is due to surgeons attempting increasingly complex operations, where the chance of something going wrong increases sharply.
However, health bosses admit there is no excuse for accidentally leaving equipment on a patient and this is formally known as a ‘never event’ as it should never happen.
Despite this, last year there were a record 335 occasions when doctors had to see people again because an object such as a swab or needle had not been removed from their body at the end of the operation.
There were 47 incidents where patients were left at risk of infection because the equipment used on them had not been properly sterilized.
And there were 132 occasions when patients were treated in hospital after a complication arose because they were not given the proper dose of medication.
Winchester (behind) pictured with his daughter and two sons.
Jeremy Parker (pictured) was sacked by the General Medical Council in February 2023.
Guy Forster, deputy vice-chairman of the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers (APIL), said: “When patients put their health in the hands of the NHS, they should be able to expect that they will not be let down by basic avoidable failures such as non-sterile equipment or “events”. ever,” such as wrong-site surgery.
‘These incidents often have very serious and long-term consequences for the victims.
‘Despite identifying these facts, lessons are not being learned and the same failures are repeated over and over again.
‘The approach to patient safety within the NHS is disjointed, with a patchwork of reporting schemes, frameworks and recommendations.
“There is an urgent need for a coordinated overall strategy to tackle the issues causing repeated unnecessary injuries and deaths in the NHS.”
A spokesperson for NHS England said: “NHS staff work very hard every day to care for patients and, while fortunately patient safety incidents like these are rare, it is vital that NHS organizations take effective steps to learn. of them and improve.
Earlier this year, a builder lost his business, his wife and his home after a botched operation left him disabled and unable to work.
Rodney Winchester, from Thetford, racked up £40,000 in debt and was left in poverty after disgraced NHS surgeon Jeremy Parker removed his entire knee joint during an operation.
Pictured: The Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton, where Sussex Police are investigating deaths between 2015 and 2020.
The father-of-three had a problem with loose cartilage in his knee and was told he would need an operation to remove the broken fragments, only to later discover the operation was unnecessary and steroid injections would have been enough.
In Brighton, a surgeon at an NHS trust under fire used a Swiss army knife from his lunch to cut open a patient after failing to find a sterile scalpel.
The unnamed surgeon was operating on a patient at the Royal Sussex Hospital in September when he allegedly couldn’t find a clean instrument.
So he decided to grab his knife that he normally used to cut the fruit for lunch.
University Hospitals Sussex said the operation was carried out outside the operating theater in an emergency situation, but its actions were “outside normal procedures and should not have been necessary”.
Fortunately, the patient survived, but the hospital felt his behavior was “questionable” and were “very surprised” that he could not find a clean scalpel.
MailOnline also revealed in September that a “rogue” children’s doctor who treated 721 children at Great Ormond Street Hospital, leaving some with serious injuries, legs of different lengths and even requiring amputations, continues to operate on unsuspecting patients in Dubai.
Dr Yaser Jabbar is a former NHS orthopedic surgeon who allegedly left dozens of children with life-changing injuries from his surgeries.
One of his alleged victims (pictured), who had a misalignment in his legs, had his leg amputated after Dr Jabbar allegedly botched his operation.
Former NHS surgeon Yaser Jabbar, 43, stopped treating patients at the hospital in 2022, after concerns were raised about his work, before moving to the Middle East and claiming to be one of the most sought-after doctors in his field.
He now lives in Dubai, where he talks about his “experience” at conferences and continues to operate on children at Clemenceau Medical Center and Orthocure orthopedic specialist hospitals, his websites show.
Great Ormond Street launched an urgent review of all young people treated by Jabbar in his orthopedic department after colleagues and relatives of his patients complained about his conduct.
Of only 37 children treated by Jabbar at the hospital who have already been evaluated, 22 of them suffered some degree of harm and 13 were classified as severely harmed.
One child had to have his leg amputated after surgery performed by Jabbar and another faces the threat of amputation.
Some have been left with legs of varying lengths, in some cases up to 20cm, while other injuries include muscle and nerve damage.