Hospital error leads to tissue sample taken from patient's liver instead of pancreas

The error at the Princess Royal Hospital in Haywards Heath was picked up at the end of the procedure and staff made a full apology.

The incident was one of five “never events” reported by Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust between April and the end of December last year.

A second incident, which happened at the end of May, involved a patient who had a swab left inside them following an operation at the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton.

Never events are serious, largely preventable incidents that should not happen if the available preventative measures have been put in place.

This includes surgery in the wrong area of the body, retained instruments post operation and the wrong administration of chemotherapy.

The provisional list of never events reported across the country has been published by NHS England. It shows the trust had four incidents but a recent report to Brighton and Hove Clinical Commissioning Group showed a fifth had also occurred.

Two of the five never events related to surgery in the wrong area and two others involved retained instruments.

Details of the fifth incident are not yet known. A trust spokeswoman said: “Never events are very rare and the majority cause minimal or no harm to the patient involved.

“However, these incidents are called never events because they should never happen.

“Whenever we have reported a never event, we have always informed the patient involved and their family, we have thoroughly investigated it and we have put measures in place to prevent it from happening again.”

Just one trust in Norfolk had a higher number of incidents – six – while two others in London had five and a further six had four.

Western Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust, which runs hospitals in Worthing and Chichester, and East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust, which has hospitals in Eastbourne and St Leonards, did not report any never events.