LONDON - The Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals Trust has come under the scanner after staff wrongly recorded the blood group of a kidney transplant patient. The error was noticed after the patient had received a new kidney of the wrong blood group.
Surgeons had to remove the transplanted kidney just a few hours after the patient had received it. If they had not done so, the patient could have developed fatal complications.
The error occurred when staff entered the blood group of the patient as A positive and sent the same to the national transplant database.
However the correct blood group, which happened to be O positive, was entered in the hospital's own records. Surgeons who performed the transplant and nurses who assisted them did not look closely enough to find the error.
A clerk was the one to pounce on the blood group mix-up. This incident took place some three years ago and has now come to light under the Freedom of Information Act. The Trust said that the patient in question, who remains unidentified, has since recovered uneventfully.
A report into the incident has not identified the specific hospital where the error occurred. The Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals Trust manages three hospitals.
UK Transplant, which manages the transplants in the country, refused to take any blame for this matter saying it had no control over how trusts entered information into the database. “We need to be clear that the mistake here was not with UK Transplant. Information that trusts provide is what goes into the national database. In this case, we have correctly recorded incorrect data," a spokeswoman said.
But the incident is likely to pose stiff questions for the government, which is looking to set up a national database to enter all patients' medical records in a centralized manner.
