In July 2021 The Sun[1]and the Telegraph[2]published an article claiming that hospital staff “may” have caused accidental deaths in Covid-19 patients due to ventilator errors.
Following a warning from the East London Coroner about the possibility of additional fatalities an inquest will now be held to look at the deaths of two patients at the London Nightingale Hospital in April of last year.
It’s believed that Kishorkumar Patel and Kofi Aning both 66 died from Covid at the temporary hospital after the incorrect filters were put inside their intensive care ventilators.
These instances (truly they are involuntary homicides) have sparked worries about the ICU staff’s attentiveness as they navigate crowded rooms during the pandemic.
Coroner Nadia Persaud said that in both cases “there was a serious incident in which the wrong filter was found to have been used within the breathing systems of their intensive care ventilator.”
“It is understood that these two cases came within a cluster of similar incidents.”
An independent expert stated in the study which was forwarded to the Faculty of Critical Care Medicine and the Royal College of Anaesthetists that intensive care professionals were dealing with “an extremely confusing situation.”
“The non-standardised colour coding used by manufacturers of these filters the number of different types of filters with different names the variable optimal position of the filters and whether a wet or a dry breathing system is being used results in an extremely confusing situation ” they said.
“In my experience few doctors and nurses working in ICU are knowledgeable about all these different filters and which ones should be used for any given breathing system.”
If the above claim is true how many more patients worldwide died because hospital staff made this kind of error since the media always comes up with a few “rare” cases when mishaps occur? Wasn’t the staff well-prepared and trained? Were such mistakes committed locally?
But could it be that such deaths had been caused by the misuse of the ventilators? And such a misuse induced deaths in Covid-19 patients?
[1]https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/15585316/hospital-staff-accidentally-killed-covid-patients-errors-ventilator-filters/
[2]https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/13/covid-patients-may-have-died-due-staff-errors-using-ventilators/