#patient-safety

#patient-safety

A surgeon guilty of professional misconduct over the death of teenager Jessica Sheedy should be given a "very significant" sanction for his failings in her care, it has been urged.

The HSE Mid West has said it accepts "full institutional responsibility" for the "catastrophic and irreparable harm caused" when teenager Jessica Sheedy died at University Hospital Limerick.

Adult literacy advocate Toni Cordell recounts the story of feeling comforted when her doctor told her that her medical concern could be solved with an easy surgery. She agreed to proceed without asking further questions and didn't understand the medical consent forms because she didn't read well. At a follow-up office visit a couple of weeks after the procedure, Cordell was shocked when the nurse asked, "How are you feeling since your hysterectomy?"

Google disabled specific queries, such as "what is the normal range for liver blood tests," after experts contacted by The Guardian flagged the results as dangerous. The report also highlighted a critical error regarding pancreatic cancer: The AI suggested patients avoid high-fat foods, a recommendation that contradicts standard medical guidance to maintain weight and could jeopardize patient health. Despite these findings, Google only deactivated the summaries for the liver test queries, leaving other potentially harmful answers accessible.

The New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) voted overwhelmingly on Monday to authorize a strike for 20,000 nurses in NYC a move made just two weeks before their contract expires. The nurses, all from private hospitals throughout the five boroughs, cited staffing issues, safety concerns, fair wages and other reasons for considering a strike. The union's vote on Dec. 22 now gives its bargaining committees the authority to call a strike if a contract that protects safe patient care is not settled by the end of the year.

Mrs Albino said: "We believe a series of systemic failures contributed to her death and we will not allow her to become just another case and a statistic." She added that her daughter's condition was worsened by anxiety. "As a family, we feel that nobody helped us and others actually worsened Emily's anxiety by not listening to our concerns," she added.

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.

I had a lady referred for a potential miscarriage from a clinic and when I scanned her they'd measured a bleed in the womb and they completely missed a very early pregnancy sac with a baby inside it, said Katie Thompson, a hospital sonographer and president of the SoR. Potentially, if they were at a private clinic that could offer a miscarriage service, then they could have been given some medication to bring on a miscarriage on a pregnancy that was actually not miscarrying, she said.

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.

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.