Barts hospital rejects dangerous medical equipment

Peter Newlands
The NHS trust responsible for St. Bart’s hospital rejects almost one fifth of new equipment because it fails basic safety guidelines, a BBC investigation has revealed.
Specialists who inspect equipment to ensure it meets the high safety standards required of surgical forceps, scalpels, clamps and other instruments routinely reject deliveries due to shoddy workmanship that could cause serious injury or infection to patients.
According to an investigation by the BBC’s Panorama programme, there have been cases where surgeons’ gloves have been punctured or torn, which would enable bacteria to easily transfer into the patient causing infection and post-surgery complications.
Tom Brophy, the lead technologist at Barts and The London Trust, told the programme that he was so concerned at the amount of equipment that fails safety checks he felt required to speak out. He revealed he had on occasion rejected entire batches of surgical tools that did not meet the standards fit for operations.
Since 2001, Barts and the London trust has rejected between 13 and 18 per cent of the instruments it receives from suppliers. The amount of time required to check so many instruments can slow down safe equipment reaching the theatres. Brophy said he is always concerned with getting good tools into the hands of the surgeons: “The need to use [the instruments] is so great; we’ve got to get them in service. We don’t want to delay operations.”
He added that some tools, which are earmarked for use in life-saving surgery, arrive at the hospital with dangerous sharp edges, metal burrs that can splinter during operations and rust on areas that would be inserted into patients. Suppliers have also tried to sell used equipment to the hospitals claiming that it is brand new, Brophy said. Used instruments could have trapped body tissue or fluid, a likely cause of MRSA infections.
“I’ve had equipment turning up that was sold to us ‘new’ but had obvious signs of use like marks and scratches, and its lustre had diminished. Once I received a batch that had dried blood all over the equipment. That was a one-off but it was a large scale one-off,” he said.
Worryingly, the same companies who supply the trust also sell equipment to the over 180 other trusts around the UK and Brophy said that rejected instruments had been sold to other hospitals.
He said: “On more than occasion a supplier has rung me up and said that the instrument you rejected, I passed it onto another hospital and they accepted it. Of course they’re going to accept it, because they haven’t checked.”
An NHS surgeon, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told the BBC investigation: “You look at your glove, which has been torn by a rough edge of an instrument, and you think, have I just cut that patient’s bowel with this?
“If we filled in a form for every time an instrument failed, we would spend the morning operating and the afternoon doing paperwork.”
The Medicines and Health Care Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) requires all of the 916 licensed suppliers of surgical equipment in the UK to be registered with them, however quality control is still the responsibility of the companies themselves.
The MHRA said it has “no evidence that non-compliant instruments are being supplied to the NHS.
“We have requested information relating to the defective surgical instruments, however, Panorama have not been forthcoming in providing the details. The MHRA takes all allegations of non-compliance extremely seriously, and where we receive evidence we will take appropriate action.”