Letter: Too many accidents at Shropshire hospitals
Thursday 14th April 2011, 6:39AM BST.
Letter: In response to the article Risks to Safety at Hospitals Revealed, Shropshire Star dated March 5.
The data from the national Patient Safety Agency reveals that there were 2,212 incidents at the Princess Royal and Royal Shrewsbury Hospitals, of which 94 resulted in moderate harm, six severe harm and two deaths.
These are 2,212 incidents too many. This does not give the public any confidence in their personnel safety if admitted to either of these hospitals.
Vicky Morris, chief nursing director for quality and safety for the trust, states that safety is one of their top priorities. If this is the case why are there so many incidents being recorded?
Could it be of a lack of security, or taking no notice or not acting on the concerns of hospital staff?
Or is it that members of the trust board would like to bury their heads in the sand and hope these incidents go away?.
May I suggest board members take a walk around these hospitals and witness some of these violent incidents for themselves, no doubt they would decline as it would be out of their contractual obligation.
John J Robinson
Wellington
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2,212 incidents too many? So you live an incident free life at home, then? You’ve never spilt a cup of tea? Never stumbled on an item left on the floor? Never knocked an object off a surface?
“Vicky Morris, chief nursing director for quality and safety for the trust, states that safety is one of their top priorities. If this is the case why are there so many incidents being recorded?”
Would you be happier if they weren’t recorded?
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Violent incidents?
The report details all incidents
“involving slips, trips, falls and errors with medication, treatment and procedures”
Any incident is one too many, but I am glad that there is a reporting system in place which highlights where things may have gone wrong and allows improvements to be made. I happen to know that board members DO walk around the hospitals on a regular basis talking to staff and listening to their concerns.
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John,
these incidents are probably not all violent incidents as you seem to jump to suddenly in your letter.
the fact is that you need to report as many incidents as possible in order to prevent the big accidents.
an incident could be that some one, member of staff or patient or visitor could have tripped over and not done any harm but did report it as then the hospital can fix the problem and sort it out.
if you start to put the fear of whatever into everyone that to report any kind of incident whether that be a near miss or and accident then you will have less incidents reported and we will then see a significant rise in serious accidents and deaths. studies have shown that for every 600 near misses there will be 59 minor injuries and for every 59 minor injuries there will be one death. so what you need to do is id all the incidents possible to try and reduce the risk of minor ijuries and deaths
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When I was in hospital a few years ago having to wait overnight for an op for a severely fractured finger a woman admitted into another bed in the same bay suddenly got out of bed shouting, “Get off my land” and she stood pointing her finger at nothing. She knocked a dripstand over which very nearly hit the poor woman in the bed next to her.
The woman in the next bed to me was agitated and shouting intermittently all night, attcking staff when they tried to change her sheets.
The fact that we have a vastly growing elderly population must have some relevence here and I fail to see what could have been done differently by the staff to avoid incidents such as this.
Years ago consultants withdrew antibiotics for very sick or what was then considered the elderly. Antibiotics were still relatively new only coming about at the start of WW11 and even at that time were denied to sick children in order to be available for our troops.
With old age often comes lack of mental capacity so caring for this age group alongside other sick people is constantly challenging and time consuming for medical staff.
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