Medical blunders revealed: Patient had wrong body part anaesthetised before operation
EXCLUSIVE
By Simon Bristow, Co-Editor
A patient at a Hull hospital had the wrong part of their body anaesthetised before an operation, and three others were left with swabs inside them after surgery, The Hull Story can reveal.
Another patient had a lens wrongly implanted in their eye.
The medical blunders are among six so-called ‘Never Events’ – deemed so serious they should never happen – at Hull University Teachings Hospitals NHS Trust (HUTH) that occurred between April and November last year.
The other error reported by the trust over the period was an operation on the wrong skin lesion.
NHS England describes Never Events as “serious, preventable patient safety incidents that should not occur if healthcare providers have implemented existing national guidance or safety recommendations”.
The trust, which runs Hull Royal Infirmary and Castle Hill Hospital, is currently the worst performing in the country, being ranked 134 out of 134 trusts in NHS England’s national performance league table.
Only four out of the 134 trusts experienced more Never Events in the same period.
In March, HUTH was named as one of the first five trusts in the country to be placed in the NHS Intensive Recovery programme.
HUTH is part of the wider NHS Humber Health Partnership (HHP) group, which includes Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust (NLaG). NLaG was also placed in the recovery programme.
Latest data published by NHS England shows there was 403 Never Events across the country between April 2025 and March 2026. NLaG had six Never Events between those dates.
The highest number of Never Events reported by a trust over that period was 12 at Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust.
A spokeswoman for Humber Health Partnership said: “Patient safety is an absolute priority for our partnership and must be central to every service and way of working. We have launched a new Learning Improvement and Safety Academy to address safety issues, learn from incidents and educate and train our workforce better to prevent incidents from happening again.
“We have also launched an internal campaign called Safety First. This relentless focus on patient safety will continue until we are delivering the excellence in care our patients expect when they come to our hospitals or use our services.”
Last month, Lyn Simpson was appointed group chief executive of HHP. She joined the trust as interim CEO in July 2025.
HUTH was ranked 123 out of 134 trusts in September last year, then fell to 130 in December. It has been bottom of the league table since March this year.