More NHS blunders revealed

The NHS was forced to reveal details of 27,000 medical blunders today - far more than expected.

Health Secretary Alan Milburn had tried to hold back the figure, which was for only 28 hospitals over a nine-month spell. But the NHS agreed to release the damning statistics after reports of the cover-up in the Evening Standard yesterday.

The figures - some 7,000 cases more than the Government would admit to last night - are the findings in the first major study into mistakes and accidents within the Health Service.

There were about 135 deaths among the 27,110 incidents which were confidentially reported by health service staff to a government agency for the study. Half of the deaths have been put down to natural causes but around 50 of the deaths cannot be easily explained and are now the subject of in-depth inquiries at hospitals across England.

Three of the deaths were caused after staff made a mix-up on wards over a solution, potassium chloride, which is often given to keep the heart working in seriously ill patients but is sometimes confused with other solutions or administered incorrectly.

The Government's chief medical officer Sir Liam Donaldson issued a full alert over the solution this morning and it has now been withdrawn from general wards in its present form. The Government is still facing uncomfortable questions today over why it had decided last week not to publish the full set of figures from the study, collated by the National Patient Safety Agency.

Mr Milburn was yesterday forced to backtrack over his original decision not to publish them amid fear that it would heighten public anxiety over the NHS.

If the statistics are extrapolated to the whole of the service, they show that there are just under one million "adverse incidents" across the NHS every year.

But government minister Lord Hunt insisted today that the results are broadly comparable to the scale of errors seen in other countries.

A tax-funded system is no more blunder-prone than one based on insurance, he said.

Among figures revealed today are:

? A total 27,110 incidents, 0.5 per cent of which are graded as catastrophic, resulting in death.

? 542 cases reported of "moderate" errors which resulted in no longterm harm.

? 4,600 cases leading to no harmful effect whatsoever.

? 5,100 minor mistakes, such as patients falling or minor drug reactions.

? 500 errors in obstetrics showing problems in child birth - delays in senior staff arriving at delivery units was shown as a significant factor.

Sir Liam, who pioneered the confidential reporting system which will eventually be rolled out across Britain, said that much of the data was unreliable and had not been fully classified.

However, he acknowledged that the scale of the errors was broadly on a par with other studies showing that one in 10 patients suffer some harmful experience in hospital.

Rather than blaming individuals he said officials must look at "systems failures" which allow human error to flourish.

"We want the bad experience of a patient in Truro to be the good experience for patients in Darlington," he said.

"Patients can be harmed physically and psychologically but let us not forget that the morale of hospital teams can also be destroyed by errors."

The most catastrophic cases led to the deaths of 120 patients, all of which are now the subject of indepth investigations.

Some of these were suicides but others are thought to be related to drugs side- effects of drugs, and surgical errors.

Speaking on BBC TV this morning Sir Liam said: "There is no question of covering anything up - we want to open up.

"We were always intending to publish the headline figures.

"Our problem had been that 50 per cent (of the reported cases) was not classified," he said.

It meant that some of the data was unreliable, and that many of the cases were quite minor and may not have needed to be included in the study at all.