Almost 25,000 hospital patients were the victims of reported medical errors last year, leading to death and serious injury in some cases.
The National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA), which revealed the figures, has issued new guidelines on patient wristbands after more than 2,900 errors were attributed to cases of mistaken identity.
Hospitals in England and Wales currently use a variety of bands, with colours or codes meaning different things. Some hospitals even use handwritten tags.
But the NPSA said these bands must now be standardised across the country in order to cut down on errors, which are thought to be widely under-reported in the NHS.
It has received reports of patients being placed in the wrong wards and given the wrong medication and blood. Some of these mistakes could have been lethal, the watchdog admitted.
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Up to 30,000 patients are estimated to die every year due to avoidable medical errors. But the true scale of the problem is largely unknown due to a reluctance by NHS staff to report mistakes and near-misses.
A statement on the NPSA website said yesterday: “Between February 2006 and January 2007, the NPSA received 24,382 reports of patients being mismatched with their care.
“It is estimated that more than 2,900 of these related to wristbands and their use.”
The errors referred to by the Agency could include patients being given the wrong surgery, medication, or tests with potentially life-threatening consequences.
The NPSA said that no further breakdown of the figures for last year was available. The agency, designed to collect data on patient safety, was denounced last year as “dysfunctional” by the Public Accounts Committee, because it had no idea how many patients died each year as a result of medical errors.
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It subsequently reported that 41,000 medication errors had been recorded between July 2005 to July 2006, which caused 36 deaths. A further 2,000 patients suffered “moderate or severe harm.”
In 2005, the National Audit Office reported that nearly one million errors or safety lapses had occurred in the previous year, causing 2,000 deaths. Half of the incidents could have been avoided if staff had learnt from past mistakes, the auditor said.
Christine Ranger, head of safer practice at the NPSA, said yesterday that the agency was foccusing on the issue of wristbands, which are causing patients to have the wrong operation, the wrong \transfusion, the wrong medication or the wrong diagnostic test.
“Some incidents will involve significant harm but we are not aware of any deaths that resulted,” she said, adding that people with common names such as Smith or Patel were at particular risk, as mistakes had happened when staff relied only on first names.
“In one case a nurse on a ward for the elderly came looking for a patient called Elsie to take a blood sample for a transfusion. There were two Elsies on the ward and the sample was taken from one while the transfusion was intended for the other. That very nearly led to a serious incident.”
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By July next year, NHS trusts must introduce white tags with black text giving details such as name, date of birth and NHS number.
Patients with known risks, such as allergies, or patients who do not wish to receive blood products, should be given a red wristband with text in black.
It has given trusts in England and Wales until next July to implement the rules. In Wales, the wristbands will also carry the first line of the patient’s address.
The move came to light yesterday after a press release was sent to the trade press but not to the national media.
The watchdog also issued guidance calling on hospitals to put protocols in place to ensure wristbands are always put on patients and safeguards are in place if they are lost.
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Mike Hayward, of the Royal College of Nursing, said: “This guidance is long overdue. It will refocus the minds of nurses on making sure that the right patient gets the right treatment.”
He said the move was especially important for agency and bank staff who work in one or more hospitals.”
Michael Summers, of the Patients Association, added: “This is great news for patients. It is worrying so many mistakes are made and hopefully this will go some way to stopping this.”
The shadow Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, said the agency had to create a culture in the NHS where reporting what went wrong was “everybody’s business”.
“If we expect individuals on the front line never to cover up then surely it is the role of the NPSA to give the greatest possible exposure to the level of errors, not to shock but to ensure we are not going to have a culture that hides anything,” he said.