POTENTIALLY deadly mistakes made at the Royal Bolton Hospital since April 2016 have been revealed.

Blunders made include an object left inside a patient, operations or treatment on the wrong part of patients’ bodies, known as wrong site surgery, and over the administration of medication.

The failings — known as “never events” — appear in a series of reports, some which are provisional, compiled by NHS Improvement.

Never events are serious incidents which but have the potential to cause serious patient harm or death — and should not happen if national guidance or safety recommendations have been implemented

In 2016/17, the period from April to March, Bolton NHS Foundation Trust reported that medication had been administered through the “wrong route” examples of which could include oral medication given intravenously.

Between April 2017 to January of this year there was an incident of wrong site surgery and a object left inside a patient after procedure; within the period February this year to end of March, there was an incident of an object left inside a patient after procedure and from April to June there was a case of wrong site surgery on a patient.

The data made public by NHS Improvement does not detail the nature of each never event incident at the hospital.

But previously The Bolton News has reported on small piece of elastic-type surgical tape which was left inside a patient during bowel surgery, wrong-sized hip replacement being implanted into a patient, a vaginal swab left inside a woman’s body and the wrong skin lesion being removed.

A spokesman for Bolton NHS Foundation Trust said: “Patient safety is paramount and any serious incident or never event is investigated thoroughly by the Trust to ensure all lessons learned are implemented and disseminated throughout the organisation.”

Nationally from February to the end of June this year there were just over 202 cases of never events.

NHS Improvement said that never events may highlight potential weaknesses in how an organisation manages fundamental safety processes.

And add that it is not about apportioning blame but to learn from what has happened.

In the report, NHS Improvement stated: “NHS providers are encouraged to learn from mistakes and any organisation that reports a never event is expected to conduct its own investigation so it can learn and take action on the underlying causes.

“The fact that more and more NHS staff take the time to report incidents is good evidence that this learning is helping locally.

“We continue to encourage NHS staff to report never events and serious incidents to STrategic Executive Information System and all patient safety incidents to the National Reporting and Learning System to help us identify any risks so that necessary action can be taken.”