The BBC has reported this week that more than half of all serious incidents where patients came to harm involving West Midlands Ambulance Service (WMAS) were due to clinical errors.
Serious incidents include acts or omissions in care that result in:
- Unexpected or avoidable death.
- Unexpected or avoidable injury resulting in serious harm.
Following an increase in the number of serious incidents at WMAS from 138 in 2021-22 to 327 in 2022-23, an audit found that 53% of the incidents were due to mistakes with their treatment.
The audit found that choking management, cardiac arrests, and inappropriate patient discharges were recurrent themes. It was also noted that a decision was made to close all community ambulance stations without first doing a full risk assessment of the impact on safety.
Furthermore, sources indicated that WMAS delayed looking into 5,000 serious patient incidents.
Since this came to light, WMAS has reviewed what was happening and begun to take action to remedy the situation.
They say they are taking on extra staff to look into patient safety incidents and they have a new system in place to deal with the backlog.
Their communications director said:
“As part of that, we have identified a number of incidents that were not investigated as they should be. We have now examined all of those cases. Three resulted in serious incidents being identified and they are being investigated.”
Comment
This is unfortunately not the first major incident with WMAS.
Earlier this week it was reported that an inquiry had found ambulance staff at WMAS had their ability to speak up as whistle-blowers had been stifled for many years.
Clearly, there are issues with the management of WMAS and its ability to address the issues at hand.
It is concerning, to say the least, that not only are serious incidents happening as a result of clinical errors, but those situations are clearly not being investigated in the way they ought to be.
Trust and confidence in the ability of WMAS to properly and appropriately care for patients will clearly be impacted by the news stories this week. The Trust now has a lot of work to do and a long way to go to rectify these issues, but it must be their absolute priority to ensure that no patient is needlessly put at risk when in their care.
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Danielle Young is a Legal Director in our Medical Negligence team, which has been ranked in tier one by the independently researched publication, The Legal 500.
If you have any questions in relation to the subjects discussed in this article, then please get in touch with Danielle or another member of the team in Derby, Leicester, or Nottingham on 0800 024 1976 or via our online form.
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