Health and Safety Hospital Deaths Considered Negligence
The UK has not suffered as much from hospital health and safety issues as New Zealand, but there is certainly a lesson to be learned from the report from New Zealand regarding health and safety at work issues. Sadly, any death in a hospital is something no one wants to see, but they do happen for one reason or another. In the case of 86 deaths in New Zealand hospitals they should not have happened at all. According to the health and safety records, 377 public hospital mishaps occurred in 2011. These mishaps resulted in 86 deaths, with several of them being said by the equivalent of the HSE in New Zealand to be preventable.
Some of the events that occurred were life threatening. This led to unexpected deaths or major loss of function in New Zealand’s public hospitals. For example, falls were one of the most common recorded incidents, with about 195 occurring in the hospital where patients fell because workers were not monitoring them properly. This was up from the previous year. There were 25 medication errors and 108 clinical management incidents.
The UK does not have these worrying numbers, but recently there were a few hospitals in the UK that were found to be negligent in patient care. Workers can learn from the record New Zealand has offered as a way to understand that if certain conditions continue in UK hospitals, it could create such a record as that shown for the last year in New Zealand.
