Medical equipment kills forty

Hundreds of reports related to problems with surgical equipment

About 40 patients were killed last year because of problems with medical equipment, official figures have revealed.

The Medical Devices Agency said it had received 8,735 reports of adverse incidents involving medical equipment last year.

One in six of these had "serious safety implications" and were investigated.

A patient died in 195 cases. Subsequent investigations found that medical equipment failures had caused 20% of these deaths.

The total number of cases involving the death of a patient is up one third on the previous year.

Problematic devices 1. Wheelchairs: 1,313 reports 2. Surgical implants: 1,208 3. Surgical equipment: 895 4. Blood transfusion equipment: 629 5. Live support machines: 558

The agency said the rise was partly because of improvements in its reporting system.

However, in its annual report, it said it was concerned by the high number of cases involving fatalities.

Officials carried out investigations into all of these cases.

The report states: "Our in-depth investigations revealed that the medical device was the major contributory cause of patients' death in only around 20% of cases.

Faulty bed rails

"In the other instances, the major contributory factors were non device-related."

Deaths occurred as a result of problems with a wide range of medical equipment, including implants, infusion systems, and anaesthetic equipment.

However, in some instances patients died after falling out of hospital beds because of faulty bed rails.

The highest number of adverse incident reports submitted to the agency last year related to wheelchairs.

This prompted the agency to issue two hazard notices warning health service staff there was a risk of wheels on two different types of wheelchairs falling off.

Alerts were also sent out to doctors after reports of problems with certain types of breathing apparatus, patient monitors and implants.

There was no clear pattern in the cause of many of the problems. Some were found to have been caused by design faults and others by human error.

Under-reporting

David Jeffreys, the agency's chief executive, said the number of adverse incident reports had increased by 7% last year.

But he added: "We believe that there is still extensive under-reporting throughout the health service."

The Department of Health said steps had been taken to try to avert problems with medical equipment.

"All serious adverse events are investigated individually in detail and appropriate action taken, as a result of that particular investigation," a spokeswoman said.

"Such actions may include product recall, the instigation of device manufacturing changes and the issuing of appropriate advice to the health service through device alerts."

She added: "In addition, MHRA (Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) looks at any trends in adverse events and takes appropriate action to address these."