Jeremy Hunt admits NHS failings and expresses horror at case of 100-year-old woman who died of dehydration in Leicester
A totally different approach to patient safety must be taken in the NHS, the health secretary has said, after a 100-year-old great-grandmother died of dehydration while in hospital.
Jeremy Hunt said the case of Lydia Spilner, who died at Leicester Royal Infirmary in February last year, was devastating.
Spilner was admitted to the hospital in January 2012 with a suspected chest infection and dehydration. Over four weeks her condition was allowed to deteriorate and her daughter's pleas for her mother to be put on a drip repeatedly ignored, the family's lawyers said.
University Hospitals of Leicestershire NHS Trust admitted that Spilner died of renal failure caused by dehydration and paid her family an undisclosed sum in an out-of-court settlement.
Hunt told ITV News on Thursday: "I think that story is absolutely devastating and I personally never cease to be horrified. As health secretary I read stories every day because I see the letters that come in when things have gone wrong in the NHS."
Earlier he told delegates at the NHS Confederation conference in Liverpool: "There are still too many places where the patient is not first and foremost in the considerations of the institution where they are being looked after. Last year there were 299 'never events', including 26 examples of a wrong implant or prosthesis put into someone's body, 62 wrong-site operations and 115 occasions where a foreign object was left in someone's body.
"I'll put that another way, once a fortnight we're putting the wrong prosthetic into people, once a week we're operating on the wrong part of someone's body and once every few days we're leaving the wrong thing inside people's bodies and that is totally unacceptable. We do need to have a totally different attitude towards safety." Reported by guardian.co.uk 10 hours ago.
A totally different approach to patient safety must be taken in the NHS, the health secretary has said, after a 100-year-old great-grandmother died of dehydration while in hospital.
Jeremy Hunt said the case of Lydia Spilner, who died at Leicester Royal Infirmary in February last year, was devastating.
Spilner was admitted to the hospital in January 2012 with a suspected chest infection and dehydration. Over four weeks her condition was allowed to deteriorate and her daughter's pleas for her mother to be put on a drip repeatedly ignored, the family's lawyers said.
University Hospitals of Leicestershire NHS Trust admitted that Spilner died of renal failure caused by dehydration and paid her family an undisclosed sum in an out-of-court settlement.
Hunt told ITV News on Thursday: "I think that story is absolutely devastating and I personally never cease to be horrified. As health secretary I read stories every day because I see the letters that come in when things have gone wrong in the NHS."
Earlier he told delegates at the NHS Confederation conference in Liverpool: "There are still too many places where the patient is not first and foremost in the considerations of the institution where they are being looked after. Last year there were 299 'never events', including 26 examples of a wrong implant or prosthesis put into someone's body, 62 wrong-site operations and 115 occasions where a foreign object was left in someone's body.
"I'll put that another way, once a fortnight we're putting the wrong prosthetic into people, once a week we're operating on the wrong part of someone's body and once every few days we're leaving the wrong thing inside people's bodies and that is totally unacceptable. We do need to have a totally different attitude towards safety." Reported by guardian.co.uk 10 hours ago.