Audit Confirms A Catalogue Of Errors At Leicester Hospitals

Specialist medical negligence lawyers have spoken of their concern that a recent audit has highlighted poor care given at an East Midlands hospitals.

In a recently published ‘Learning Lessons to Improve Care’ Clinical Quality Audit, reported by the Leicester Mercury, 29 patients out of 177 cases were rated to have received poor or very poor care.

A shocking finding in the report, released by Leicestershire’s three Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), was that staff failed to notice a patient had died. 

A further 19 failures were highlighted under the ‘End of Life’ category, including patients being resuscitated against their wishes because paperwork saying they did not want to be revived had not been prepared or signed off.

Tom Mather, a partner and medical negligence specialist at Irwin Mitchell, said: 

Expert Opinion

“We are concerned to note the number of cases in which patients received poor or very poor care, and we welcome auditing of care to highlight areas for improvement into patient care and safety.

“It is important that the audit findings are taken on board to ensure that standards improve in those areas identified.” Tom Mather - Partner

Out of the 177 cases reviewed, 29 patients received poor or very poor care and 57 cases were rated adequate. 

The report also damningly revealed that 143 patients – the vast majority of those looked at – were admitted to hospital unnecessarily.

Speaking about the latest report at a meeting of all three CCGs, Caroline Trevithick, chief nurse and quality lead for West Leicestershire CCG, said: “Having these patients’ stories really brings it home to people to enable them to focus on what needs to be done.

“The audit does demonstrate evidence of us moving forward, but it does also demonstrate that there are some fundamental problems.

“We have an action plan in place and a lot of what is included in that action plan is already in place.”

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