A Bolton NHS Foundation Trust patient received medication via the wrong route in the trust's first Never Event for more than a year.

A Never Event is an incident which is preventable to the point it should never occur if all available prevention is implemented.

The Bolton Foundation NHS Trust, which is responsible for Royal Bolton and a number of other services, went more than a year without one of these incidents between July of last year and July of this year. In contrast there were four of these incidents in the 12 months to July 2022.

However, according to the agenda of a meeting last month, this came to an end when a patient received medication via the wrong route.

It is understood they received medication meant for oral administration via an IV infusion or an injection. Their condition was not revealed.

Lianne Robinson, Deputy Chief Nurse at Bolton NHS Foundation Trust, apologised and assured The Bolton News of its robust response.

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Ms Robinson said: "We are really sorry to our patient and to their family who were impacted by this care. 

"We are currently looking at what happened so we can better understand what took place and we are keeping in touch with the family along the way.

"Our staff work incredibly hard to provide the highest quality of care to our patients and communities making these types of events extremely rare.

"When they do occur we take them incredibly seriously and we have robust systems in place so we are able to understand what happened as quickly as possible, to learn from them, and to make the necessary improvements to prevent anything similar happening again."

Other Never Events include surgeries on the wrong part of the body and surgeries in which items are left inside a part of the body post-procedure.

Overall there were 350 Never Events across the country between October of last year and October of this year including at neighbours Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust and Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Foundation Trust.

This article was written by Jack Tooth. To contact him, email jack.tooth@newsquest.co.uk or follow @JTRTooth on Twitter.