§ Mr. BurnsTo ask the Secretary of State for Health how many patients within the NHS have(a) died and (b) been injured as a result of user error of medical equipment in each of the last five years. [29776]
§ Ms Blears[holding answer 28 January 2002]: The national health service reports incidents involving medical devices to the Medical Devices Agency (MDA) who maintain a database of reported incidents.
The MDA has successfully promoted the adverse incident reporting system over this period. There has been an increase in the total number of reports received from 5,380 in 1997 to 7,896 in 2001. Therefore, these figures do not necessarily indicate an increase in the number of incidents occurring, rather the results of the strenuous efforts taken by the MDA to improve incident reporting.
From the MDA's database the number of patients within the NHS that (a) died and (b) been injured as a result of user error of medical equipment in each of the last five years is given in the table.
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2001 2000 1999 1998 1997 (a) User error incidents involving a fatality 7 0 2 0 0 (b) User error incidents involving an injury 45 21 7 3 3 The National Patient Safety Agency will be working closely with the MDA in the reporting and sharing of information on adverse incidents involving medical devices. This collaboration will serve to enhance patient safety by learning from errors involving medical devices and in this way help reduce harm to future patients.