Woman Dead From Brit Hospital Blunders

(Plymouth, England) A patient died because nurses were confused and doctors didn't respond to pages. Working confused and uncommunicative is an ugly way to describe the British National Health Service (NHS), but it's not necessarily wrong.

A hospital patient died after nurses wrote vital medical notes on paper towels and post-it stickers.

Patricia Prowse, aged 78, went into hospital for a minor operation but died after a succession of blunders left her without essential anti-stroke drugs for three days.

Confused nurses tried to check the prescription with doctors but queries left on her drug sheet were lost and pagers never answered.

That's right -- nurses communicated hospital orders on sticky notes, scraps of paper and paper towels. As a result, Prowse was never given the proper medication ordered by the doctor. Meanwhile, the doctor(s) apparently didn't respond in a timely manner to pages on beepers.

Even though it appears that blunders actually led to the death, Coroner Rob Newman said Prowse died from natural causes and errors only contributed to the death.

He said: "In the course of this inquest a number of failures on the part of those entrusted with this patient's care have been identified.

"A number of failings relate to the recording, or not recording of information. There was not good communication between the nursing staff and doctors and part of that was the way in which messages were passed.

"It does not appear that on any of the occasions when nurses bleeped doctors to get advice about Clexane these were responded to while they remained on duty, even though in most cases that amounted to a number of hours.

"The other way messages were passed was through notes. Post-it labels were used twice, what seems to be a scrap of paper once, and a paper towel was used on another occasion.

"This was an absorbent paper towel. I asked if it was possible to write on it and was assured it is and it appears this was not the first time it happened.

"There was nothing to indicate the name of the patient or the date or time of the messages.

"Significantly, none of the four messages are available even though the investigation started very shortly after the patient's death."

So, it's death by natural causes and no pristine government heads need to be rolled. No licenses lost, no certifications revoked and no massive civil suits. The National Health Service is blameless in the demise of Patricia Prowse. Move along now, nothing to see here.