Sunday 7 February 2010

Patient dies in hospital after 'do not resuscitate' form is mistakenly put in his files

A patient who suffered a heart attack on a hospital ward died because clerical staff had mistakenly inserted a ‘Do Not Attempt Resuscitation’ form into his medical notes.

Peter Clarke was not treated by doctors after going into cardiac arrest as a nurse had spotted the form in his files and, even though it was blank and had not been filled in, told other ward staff he should not be revived. The blunder emerged at an inquest into the incident at Derby Hospitals NHS Trust, where bosses revealed staff had been ‘routinely’ placing the forms alongside medical records before they had been correctly signed and witnessed by senior doctors.

The errors go against the usual Trust policy on using the forms and mean the documents were inserted into files without the consent of patients. It has affected an unknown number of patients and it is not known how long the practice was going on...
Source: Daily Mail
Spotted by: JuliaM

5 comments:

Brian, follower of Deornoth said...

"inserted into files without the consent of patients"

Oh. How convenient.

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Mark Wadsworth said...

BFOD, one does rather wonder whether, having f***ed this up, they just bunged a blank form into his folder as a cover up. But they wouldn't stoop to that, would they? Surely not?

Pie said...

It is common practice to pin a blank DNR form to a patient's notes as a reminder to the doctors to review the patient's resus status.
Also, a patient does not have to consent to a DNR order.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Pie, but they didn't 'review' anything, did they? They just let him die, even assuming no cover-up.