Patients at hospitals run by Pennine Acute Hospital NHS Trust faced years of negligent treatment, misdiagnoses, poor clinical judgement, apathetic and unqualified staff, short-staffing, and chronic under resourcing. This was the verdict of a report commissioned in early 2016 by the Trust itself and prepared by its Director of Maternity Care.
Unfortunately for patients at North Manchester General and Royal Oldham Hospitals the report was then buried and only came to light (after repeated denials from the Trust that it even existed) following an investigation by the Manchester Evening News. Once exposed the report made national headlines.The failings highlighted in the report make for disturbing and in many cases tragic reading. Among the more appalling examples of negligence identified at the Trust between 2010 and June 2016 (when the report was completed) include
- A premature baby being left to die alone in a room used to dispose of medical waste.
- Another baby who died because of an elementary failure to check its mother's blood type
- Routine failures to take basic observations and keep basic records
- Lab results left unchecked
- Patient records incorrectly, incompletely, or only tardily filled out
- Lack of effective performance monitoring of the Trust's historically high numbers of agency/locum staff
- Newborn babies' heart rates not being monitored properly, leading to serious and lifelong health problems (including brain damage) which would otherwise have been preventable
- A woman misdiagnosed as mentally ill when she was actually suffering from a cerebral haemorrhage, and who was subsequently allowed to die of hypoxia over the course of several days
- A woman who was left with a permanent colostomy because her treatable faecal peritonitis was missed by surgeons on three separate occasions over the course of 24 hours
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