KGH says sorry after another medication mix-up

Kettering General Hospital bosses have apologised after another medication blunder - the FIFTH never event to take place there this year.

An investigation has been launched after the serious mix-up - classed as the kind of mistake which should never happen - saw a patient given medication through the wrong route in October.

Whether the patient involved suffered any harm or not as a result of the error has not been made public.

It echoes a similar incident in September, which was also recorded as a never event, when a patient was given a dose intravenously when it should have been administered orally.

The hospital said extensive actions were 'immediately put in place' following the most recent incident.

Kettering General Hospital’s interim medical director, Rabia Imtiaz, said: “While ‘never events’ and other serious incidents are relatively rare we take them very seriously and investigate them appropriately.

“We have sincerely apologised to the patient involved in the most recent never event incident and are investigating this in line with national never events policy and framework, involving and supporting the patient and staff involved.

“While the investigation is ongoing we have ensured that necessary risk controls are in place to avoid any such recurrence.

“We are always looking to continuously improve our patient safety arrangements and have been working with our colleagues in Northampton, as a hospital group, to look at how we share and embed learning from such safety incidents.

“As an example we held a countywide never event learning event on November 19 which included reflections from staff and patients. This is helping us to share learning and further develop best practice approaches as part of our continuous improvement approach.”

All five never events in 2021 have been declared serious incidents.

In July we reported that a blunder saw a patient given a Lucentis injection - a drug which can potentially have serious side effects - into their wrong eye.

Then, in August, we reported that another incident in ophthalmology resulted in a patient being given an eye injection based on another person's scans, which were wrongly labelled with their details.

The first 2021 incident took place in February when a patient inadvertently connected their oxygen tubing to the medical air flow meter.

Prior to February the last never event at KGH was in November 2019, although details of the incident were not made public.

KGH's target is to have zero each year, a target it hit in 2020.