#patient-safety

#patient-safety

Breast cancer patients suffered unnecessary mastectomies, delayed diagnoses and a lack of compassionate care at an NHS Trust in north-east England, the BBC has learned. More than 200 cases are now being investigated at County Durham and Darlington Foundation Trust (CDDFT) - 43 of these are reported to involve significant harm. One death is also being examined. Women have told us they were left feeling "butchered" by surgery,

An NHS trust has been fined 200,000 for failing to provide "safe care and treatment" for a 16-year-old girl who died on hospital grounds after fleeing her ward. Ellame Ford-Dunn, from Upper Beeding, West Sussex, died at Worthing Hospital in March 2022 where she had been admitted as a mental health inpatient. She ran into the grounds of the hospital and was not immediately followed by a nurse because of "confusion" and a lack of appropriate procedure in place, the court heard.

Alice Figueiredo, 22, took her own life in a mental health unit at Goodmayes Hospital, Redbridge, after more than 10 similar attempts. Her death on 7 July 2015 followed a failure to remove items from the communal toilets on Hepworth Ward that had been used by her to self-harm. Following an Old Bailey trial, North East London NHS Foundation Trust (NELFT) was found guilty of failing to ensure

Care homes that are graded as inadequate or requiring improvement are often not being reinspected for a year or more, a BBC investigation has found. More than 2,100 care homes in England as of October this year were rated as "requires improvement" by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) - but the BBC found three quarters of those had not been reinspected within a year or more.

In one of my courses at Stanford Medical School, my classmates and I were tasked with using a secure AI model for a thought experiment. We asked it to generate a clinical diagnosis from a fictional patient case: "Diabetic retinopathy," the chatbot said. When we asked for supporting evidence, it produced a tidy list of academic citations. The problem? The authors didn't actually exist. The journals were fabricated. The AI chatbot had hallucinated.

The Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which runs the Freeman, did not respond to most of the questions put to it by the BBC, including why it thought it appropriate to let Ms Booth resume her surgical career. The trust did however point to a problematic working culture in the cardiac unit at the time of the failures, while internal reports have criticised poor governance procedures and a reluctance from senior staff to take responsibility over safety concerns.

A woman who was sexually assaulted by her physiotherapist has said he should have been stopped from practising earlier, to prevent him abusing more patients. Sarah Johnson, 42, from Meopham in Kent, who has waived her right to anonymity, is calling for immediate suspension of practitioners under investigation for alleged sexual offences. In June 2024, Purnoor Bawa, from Gravesend, was jailed for six years for touching six women inappropriately during treatment sessions between 2013 and 2019.

Staff at a specialist eating disorder unit have been photographed sleeping when they should have been looking after patients who were at risk of harming themselves. There were multiple "unsafe" incidents because of staff failings, according to whistleblowers. Many seriously ill patients have told the BBC they felt their time on the unit had made their condition worse. Schoen Clinic York said "where specific concerns have been raised, they have been fully investigated and addressed" but no "systemic issues" were found.

AI agents - autonomous, task-specific systems designed to perform functions with little or no human intervention - are gaining traction in the healthcare world. The industry is under massive pressure to lower costs without compromising care quality, and health tech experts believe agentic AI could be a scalable solution that can help with this arduous goal. However, this AI category comes with greater risk than that of its AI predecessors, according to one cybersecurity and data privacy attorney.

Archie Mayani is the chief product officer at GHX, a global supply chain company that uses data and cloud-based technologies to connect healthcare providers like hospital systems and their suppliers. For more than 20 years, Mayani has worked on clinical and supply-chain health technologies at companies like Change Healthcare and United Health Group. At GHX, Mayani works to ensure that the company develops technology that can help hospitals procure patient supplies - like implants and IV fluids - as seamlessly as possible.

The audit found serious problems, including crazy long lag times for investigating urgent complaints (almost three months for high-priority situations, such as patient deaths) and more than a year for less dire complaints (meaning problems can fester and put patient safety at risk). It also found that when the state brought its weight to bear on unlicensed homes illegally providing services, regulators didn't always bother to venture out to see for themselves what was actually happening.

Trump administration officials are talking about more military strikes against suspected drug gangs in the southern Caribbean. This follows a US attack on a small boat from Venezuela that President Donald Trump says killed 11 "narcoterrorists."

Coroner Mary Hassell wrote in a Prevention of Future Death Report: It is well recognised that the admission of an elderly person to hospital can be risky and should only be undertaken if really necessary. These days, a long wait on a hospital trolley is predictable. Even without that, the elderly are known often to decondition quickly. The coroner added that district nurses had not dressed Mrs Fitzpatrick's wound frequently enough and sometime they had not gone to see her or change her sacral dressing.

Martha's rule, a way for families to seek an urgent second opinion if they are concerned about the care their loved ones receive, will be rolled out across all English hospitals delivering acute or short-term treatment. The telephone helpline, the result of a campaign by the parents of 13-year-old Martha Mills who died after serious failings in her care, has been piloted in 143 hospital sites in England since April 2024.

In 2025, the Emergency Care Research Institute (ECRI) produced a ranked list of 10 threats to patient care. At the top of the list was "Dismissing patient, family, and caregiver concerns." In a survey done by HealthCentral, they found that over 94 percent of their survey-takers felt that "their doctors have ignored or dismissed their symptoms." More than 61 percent of respondents reported that their doctors "blamed them for their symptoms or made them feel like they were crazy."

June Molloy, the Communications and Public Affairs Manager for the HSE Dublin and North East, said that "in the course of our quality assurance process in the hospital, we commissioned an independent look back of all histopathology slides across various specialties in relation to one consultant, focusing on a period from February to November 2024. "This review is underway and any patients in relation to whom any findings are relevant will be contacted directly by the hospital. HSE Dublin and North East has provided necessary information to the HSE in line with the National Patient Safety Briefing Protocol."

"The people of Illinois deserve quality healthcare from real, qualified professionals and not computer programs that pull information from all corners of the internet to generate responses that harm patients," IDFPR Secretary Mario Treto, Jr. said.

Fifteen nurses have since been fired, and another disciplined, amid questions over how Niyimbona was able to leave her room undetected.

The Countess of Chester hospital's emergency care is found inadequate, with critical gaps in sepsis treatment and overcrowding affecting patient safety and dignity.

A 68-year-old patient at an Encompass facility in Jackson, Tennessee, was found lying in a pool of his own blood after staff turned off an alarm meant to alert nurses.

Mohammed Alazawi, 54, was sentenced to nine years for carrying out multiple unsafe and illegal circumcisions across the UK, including in the West Midlands.

"Where capacity was limited in local services, gaps in medical posts were sometimes covered by PAs, without taking into account their more limited training or ensuring that supervisors had the necessary understanding of the roles and the time and skills required to provide appropriate oversight."