As many as one in five hospital trusts in England might be covering up mistakes, suggests a government review.
The analysis of reporting incidents indicates that 29 out of 141 trusts weren’t registering the number of safety incidents they would be expected to.
The data has been released as part of a drive by the Department of Health and NHS England to improve patient safety in the NHS.
Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said patients have a right to know about problems with reporting, and that it is important for hospitals to be “open and honest”.
He told BBC Radio 4 that the decision to release the data is not about “humiliating” anyone.
“The NHS is there for patients and if a hospital has a problem with its reporting culture, I think patients have a right to know that,” he said.
If patients are aware of the problems with certain hospitals, the hospitals in question will be encouraged to act quicker, Mr Hunt concluded.
In March, the health secretary set a target to save 6,000 lives over the following three years by reducing the number of serious mistakes that are made.
He has requested that trusts join a ‘Sign up to Safety’ campaign and devise plans to halve incidents of “avoidable harm” such as errors in medication, bedsores and blood clots by 2016-17. Mr Hunt said that this could potentially stop one in three preventable deaths in the next few years – equivalent to saving 6,000 lives.
This Tuesday (24th June) the government will launch the next stage of the ‘Sign up to Safety’ campaign by introducing a website offering patients the chance to view individual hospital performance based on measures such as infection rates and staffing levels. The website will be hosted on the NHS Choices site and show which trusts have been rated poorly in terms of their open and honest reporting. Trusts with a lower-than-expected rate of incident reporting will be followed up by NHS England officials.
Fiona Hedges, Medical Negligence Solicitor at Russell Worth solicitors, said: “Is it very concerning to hear that as many as one in five hospitals might be covering up their mistakes and this is not easy information to hear. When we are ill we put our trust in hospitals to look after us but according to these figures some hospitals might not always be fulfilling their duty to do so.
“We hope that all hospital trusts in England join the government’s ‘Sign up to Safety’ campaign and that the campaign goes some way to reducing the number of avoidable errors happening in hospitals. These are small but very significant errors that with proper care and attention can so easily be fixed.”
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