Another Bolton NHS Foundation Trust patient received medication via the wrong route - within weeks of another 'never event' of the same type.

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

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

This came to an end when a patient received medication via the wrong route in August and, in November, another patient received medication via the wrong route again.

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The administration of medication via the wrong route refers to incidents such as a medication intended for oral consumption being given via an IV infusion or given via an injection instead.

Tyrone Roberts, the chief nurse at the trust, apologised after the incidents came to light in the agenda of a meeting of the trust earlier this week.

The Bolton News: Tyrone Roberts

Mr Roberts said: "The safety of our patients and the quality of the care they receive is always our top priority, and we are sorry when that care falls below the high standards we expect.

"Thankfully never events are extremely rare, but when we do get it wrong we take it very seriously by looking carefully at what happened, so that we can learn and improve to make sure it does not happen again."

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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 362 never events across the country between November 2022 and November of last 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.