Swab left inside new mum after she gives birth at Mid Yorkshire NHS Trust hospital

A medical swab was left inside a new mum after she gave birth in hospital, it's been revealed.
The Mid Yorkshire trust runs maternity units at Pinderfields and Dewsbury Hospitals, but declined to say which site the incident took place at.The Mid Yorkshire trust runs maternity units at Pinderfields and Dewsbury Hospitals, but declined to say which site the incident took place at.
The Mid Yorkshire trust runs maternity units at Pinderfields and Dewsbury Hospitals, but declined to say which site the incident took place at.

The object was misplaced as the woman underwent a procedure shortly after she had her baby, publicly released NHS papers said.

The incident happened on April 5 this year at either Pinderfields Hospital in Wakefield or Dewsbury Hospital.

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The Mid Yorkshire NHS Trust, which runs both sites, declined to confirm at which hospital it took place, but apologised and said a full investigation is still underway.

The swab was later removed in an operating theatre and the mother suffered no harm as a result of the incident.

The mistake has been logged as an NHS 'never event', used to describe incidents that take place in hospital which are deemed to be preventable.

The trust recorded a separate never event in May after a patient was found to have had a skin lesion operation on the wrong hand.

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Dr Karen Stone, the trust's medical director, said: "Everybody within our trust works extremely hard to ensure our patients receive the best possible care, and we are sorry when this level of care falls below the standards we expect and strive towards.

"In these two instances, whilst no harm came to either patient, we are sorry that they both had to have additional procedures to rectify their situations.

“A full investigation is still in progress for the maternity event, which includes a

review of our theatre processes against national safety standards.

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"Once we have concluded this we will be putting the recommendations into practice.

"We want to assure our patients that we take any never event extremely seriously, they are called never events because they should never happen.

"Conducting a thorough investigation with all parties involved, when one does

happen, is crucial for us to understand where we can make improvements to stop the same thing happening again.”

Dr Stone said the trust's dermatology and plastic surgery departments were working together to review practices after the operation on the patient's wrong hand.

Local Democracy Reporting Service