Bosses at the health trust that runs the BRI and Weston General Hospital say they have learned vital lessons after staff failed to notify the daughter of a dying woman in time for her to say goodbye. In another case, University Hospitals Bristol & Weston NHS Trust (UHBW) had to apologise and made improvements to keeping operating theatres available, after it failed twice to plan a patient’s surgery on time and then did not follow them up as an outpatient properly.
It also paid £500 compensation to a woman for distress caused when a midwife wrongly told an ambulance crew that she could make her own way to hospital, which led to the introduction of a new dedicated telephone triage system to stop it happening again. These were three of the four cases partly upheld against UHBW by the Parliamentary & Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) since April 2020, which were revealed in a report to the trust’s board to show how things had been put right to avoid similar mistakes in future.
The fourth involved factual errors and inconsistencies in its response to a complaint from a patient, which led to a “loss of faith in the answers provided and left the complainant feeling that she was not being taken seriously”. The ombudsman told the organisation to pay her £300. The report to the board said all four cases were from 2020/21 and that not a single one had been upheld or partly upheld in the two years since then.
