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Patient safety alert on the risk of inadvertently cutting in-line (closed) suction catheters

NHS England has issued a Patient Safety Alert on the risk of inadvertently cutting in-line (closed) suction catheters. The alert has been issued to all NHS hospitals and community services in England that use in-line or closed suction systems as part of patient care.

It follows a recent incident where an in-line (or closed) suction catheter was left in the endotracheal tube (ET tube) by mistake. When the ET tube was cut, the suction catheter was also cut and the tip remained in the ET tube. The incident was not noticed for several days and during this time the tip of the suction catheter migrated into the patient’s main airway. The tip was identified on a chest X-ray and subsequently removed by bronchoscopy.

You can read the full risk of inadvertently cutting in-line (closed) suction catheters patient safety alert.

One comment

  1. Jenny Hughes says:

    To NHS England (& all other pointless NHS bodies)

    Sick of reading all the blurb: had 14 years since An Organisation with a Memory and 13 years since the next one saying: STILL not learning.

    And now oh, THIS time it’ll be different, ‘THIS time we MEAN it’ ?

    Why & how can we trust you/it/NHS/governments now?
    Candour? Oh ha ha ha. Not funny though.

    All empty words and hot air.

    Now, all these years later = saying the same stuff all over again.
    Pointless if 1st and 2nd didn’t work?

    And Being Open was out in 2005 (before my bungled op) yjen put out AGAIN in 2009. What’s the point if nothing changed after the 2005 one and with my errors/injuries they still lied, covered up and made me go out to kill myself?

    How much money wasted = meetings, writing, refining, medico-legal input, printing, distributing all the Being Open letters, leaflets, posters? In 2005? Again in 2009? All a WASTE, refund tax=payers, oh but we pay all = refund ourselves?

    All rubbish. Why must we/others tell docs stuff thats already in their GMC rules but never enforced?

    It’s all fake, all waste, all pointless, are YOU too?
    If not = prove it, so MANY regulators/bodies = WASTE.
    All know what should do already.