Hospitals wasting up to £2.5 billion per year on medical error

In a speech at Birmingham Children’s hospital, the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, will claim today that Hospitals are wasting up to £2.5bn a year of the total NHS budget through basic poor care and medical error.

Hunt will renew his criticism of inadequate patient safety standards in the NHS by warning of a “dangerous nexus between poor care and higher cost”.

He will cite a new report, commissioned by the Department of Health, which found that poor care costs the NHS as much as £2.5bn, a year.

It estimates that mistakes with medication, including medication ‘never events’, cost the NHS up to £770m in treating patients who have had an adverse reaction to a drug or suffered harm as a result.

Reducing the number of patients who develop an infection after orthopaedic surgery could save up to £300m, as infection in someone who has had a new hip fitted can cost up to £70,000.

Similarly, better recognition of sepsis, a blood infection that kills an estimated 37,000 people a year, could save a further £196m, according to the research by Frontier Economics, which reviewed previous studies into the costs of patient safety lapses.