A Medical AI System Just Identified 10 Cases of “Never Events” in UK Hospitals, Including a Doctor Leaving a Surgical Item Inside a Patient.
The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) is grappling with a serious issue: medical errors that should never happen. These “never events” include a surgeon leaving a surgical item inside a patient, which happened to **Elise Cattle** in 2019.
But, as the weeks went by, rather than the pain subsiding, she remained crippled with it. The birth of Elise Cattle’s first child was traumatic. A so-called back-to-back birth in which the baby’s spine is against the mother’s, making labour longer and more painful meant the delivery saw her being operated on for over three hours. The complications arose after a medical professional left an instrument, a swab, inside her body. This medical malpractice was only discovered when a CT scan was performed 10 weeks after the operation. The incident is one of 10 ‘never events’ recently identified by a medical AI system in NHS trusts across the UK.
A team of researchers at the University of Edinburgh has developed an AI tool that uses machine learning algorithms to sift through medical records and identify potential errors. The system analyzed over 2.5 million patient records and flagged these cases, which are considered “never events” because they should never occur in medical practice. These incidents include surgical equipment being left inside patients, patient poisoning due to medication errors, or other preventable harm.
What this means: this AI system has the potential to improve patient care by identifying and preventing medical errors that could have been avoided with more stringent quality control measures. While technology cannot replace human professionals entirely, it can help streamline processes, reduce human error, and make healthcare more accountable.
