NHS 'risks lives by snubbing alerts'

NHS hospitals are putting lives at risk by failing to comply with key alerts on patient safety, a report warned today.

Even "rapid response" alerts telling NHS trusts to update their procedures urgently are not complied with by the deadlines, said the study by Action against Medical Accidents (AvMA), a not-for-profit organisation which helps direct people to lawyers who specialise in personal injury compensation.

It found 1,242 cases where individual patient safety alerts had not been complied with after the deadline had passed, according to figures provided by the Department of Health.

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These included alerts on medicines, using equipment in a way that minimises pain, surgery and the risk of overdoses. Some were several years beyond their date for completion.

Two-thirds of 400 trusts had failed to comply with at least one alert, while more than 60 had failed to comply with urgent rapid response alerts.

A total of 29 trusts had not complied with 10 or more alerts, including seven from Yorkshire among them York's NHS trust, which had failed to respond to 20 alerts and Barnsley with 14.

The study said: "There remain serious weaknesses in the system which means that the situation is probably even more worrying than these figures suggest."

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AvMA chief executive Peter Walsh said the results came despite previous warnings from the organisation. "Our findings are very worrying, bearing in mind patient safety alerts deal with recognised life-and-death issues, and the Department of Health itself issued a wake-up call to trusts following our last report," he said.

A spokesman for the National Patient Safety Agency said: "Whilst, of course, we would like every NHS organisation to report complete compliance with our alerts as well as those issued by other bodies, we are pleased that almost all NHS organisations have reported completion with the vast majority of alerts."

A York NHS trust spokesman said: "Patients can be assured that York is a safe hospital. We are aware of the alerts in this report and we have a system within the organisation for managing them when they are issued. Some of them are complex and take longer to implement, but we have an action plan for each alert to ensure it is carried out."

Sharon Linter, director of quality and standards at Barnsley, said it had implemented all but one of the alerts issued and took patient safety very seriously, with a score of 14/14 for safety and cleanliness in the most recent Care Quality Commission ratings."