The show investigated the mistakes being made, and spoke to a woman wrongly diagnosed with cancer who underwent an unnecessary operation on her breasts, and also met a man whose father died an agonising death after a lump of gauze was left inside him after a prostate operation.
The chief inspector of hospitals has warned four out of five NHS Trusts in England need to improve in patient safety.
ITV Tonight spoke to Lisa Brewer, 45, from Essex, who discovered a lump in her breast just over a year ago. She had a number of tests including a mammogram, which she was told was ‘encouraging’.
Doctors also took biopsies tissue samples from both breasts, to rule out cancer. Two weeks later she received the results from her doctor.
Lisa said: “I knew something was wrong, because I could just tell by her face. And she said ‘It’s not the news we were expecting but I am afraid you’ve got grade 2 cancer of the breast.’
“I remember thinking, I got ready today looking in the mirror putting my makeup on and I was fine and now I have got cancer.”
Facing the possibility of having both breasts removed the mum-of-five had life saving surgery.
Lymph nodes and other parts of her breasts were removed and she was left with permanent scarring.
But shockingly, weeks later the hospital contacted her to reveal it has made a massive error.
Lisa was told there had “been some kind of mix-up” and she didn’t actually have cancer.
She recalled: “It’s weird I didn’t feel relieved, because you can’t just shut them emotions off like that straight away. Having to tell people that previously I had told I had cancer and tell them I don’t have it, I felt like a fraud in some way.”
This also meant another woman was told she did not have cancer, when in fact she did.
ITV Tonight contacted her, but she didn’t want to be identified, although she did say: “I had to go through an additional, unnecessary, operation, but my breast cancer treatment was fortunately not delayed. I am now concentrating on my recovery.”
The NHS deals with over one million patients every 36 hours so mistakes like Lisa’s are incredibly rare.
Today the Care Quality Commission’s chief inspector of hospitals, Prof Sir Mike Richards, criticised a “failure to learn” in NHS England when things go wrong.
ITV Tonight revealed there is one type of serious clinical medical case that is now the highest in four years – so-called “never-events”, which are preventable mistakes happening every day in the NHS in England and Wales.
This can range from the wrong part of the body being operated on, to medical items being left inside the patient after surgery.
Vince Hubbard spoke to the programme to share the story of his father, Frank, who went into hospital for a prostate operation in 2001. Even though the operation went well, the surgical team left a large lump of gauze inside him by mistake.
The gauze was left inside him for 13 years. Vince said: “It was within his groin and you imagine that in your groin pressing on all your nerves, your bones, your joints.
“I watched my dad suffer for years. I watched him go from being very active, he was very fit. I saw him deteriorate to the point that he died an awful death.”
Luton and Dunstable University Hospital carried out the operation and also missed the swab in a CT scan in 2003.
Frank Hibbard died in 2014, just a few months after the gauze was found. It had calcified into a mass the size of a small melon.
The coroner said it had ‘materially contributed’ to Frank developing a type of cancer ‘which ultimately led to his death’.
The Trust has apologised to the family, and says safe surgery checklists are followed to “minimise the possibility of this happening again”.
In response to the discoveries made by ITV Tonight, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said: “We want the NHS to offer the safest and best care anywhere in the world – which means becoming an organisation that consistently learns from its mistakes and makes improvements in the interests of patients, and we have a big programme of reform underway to help achieve that goal.
“From April, all NHS Trusts will be required to publish how many deaths they might have been able to avoid, along with the lessons that they have learned to improve care.
“The Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch will help the NHS learn from mistakes in the same way that the airline industry does and improve the quality of investigations across the NHS.”
NHS: Medical Blunders Revealed – Tonight is on ITV this evening at 7.30pm
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