HEALTH ALARM: AMA Queensland president
Dr Mason Stevenson has called the delay in
releasing a patient safety report a ''scandal''.
A SIX-month delay in releasing the latest Queensland Health patient safety report has been labelled a scandal by the Australian Medical Association.
The 2007-08 report was given to Health Minister Paul Lucas's office last year but only posted on the Queensland Health website this month.
The Courier-Mail yesterday reported key details of the 106-page report.
Australian Medical Association Queensland president Mason Stevenson said the report should have been released much sooner.
"The question has to be asked: 'Why?' Is it because the minister doesn't like to read reports or did he have something to hide, or both?" Dr Stevenson said.
"As a result, the report is almost two years out of date and we would hope and expect that this scandal is not repeated."
The report details more than 57,000 adverse events and near misses in Queensland public hospitals for the 2007-08 financial year, most of them resulting in no patient harm.
But 169 cases involved deaths or permanent injury, some of which were clearly preventable.
Three cases involved women having the wrong ovary or fallopian tube removed.
Another woman fell pregnant after a tubal ligation was not performed during a caesarean section, despite her consenting to the procedure.
The women were among 27 cases where procedures were performed on either the wrong person or body part. During the same period, more than 1.4 million procedures were performed in Queensland public hospitals.
"These figures suggest that incidents of procedures involving the wrong patient or body part are a relatively rare event," the report says. Queensland Health introduced a mandatory "three Cs" protocol: correct patient, correct site, correct procedure for all invasive procedures in June 2009, aimed at eliminating such mistakes.
Queensland Health's Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Service executive director John Wakefield said the report was not all bad news.
For example, it shows that in the five years to 2008, measures introduced by Queensland Health had cut the yearly number of pressure ulcers in public hospitals by about 20,000. Pressure ulcers increase a patient's average length of stay by three days.
Mr Lucas yesterday said the report should have been released earlier and he had made this clear to Queensland Health.
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