National Health Service (NHS) England has issued a patient safety alert over the risk of severe harm and death from unintentional interruption of noninvasive ventilation (NIV).
The alert has been issued to raise awareness of the problem, after national monitoring highlighted it as a risk, said NHS England in a statement.
It said the National Reporting and Learning System had identified patient safety incidents where harm has been caused when the oxygen supply was found to be disconnected.
In one incident a mask for NIV was attached to a patient’s face but the ventilation machine had not been switched on. The patient became severely hypoxic and died.
Is England one of the regions where there are no Respiratory Therapists and the ventilators and noninvasive equipment is run by nurses and some physicians that do not receive the same level of training or achieve the level of expertise that we possess in the U.S and Canada? Sorry but is definitely begged the question………..
Very true comment but it never happened on my shift as I checked everything but I hated going off for the weekend because I had to leave it to amateurs. I remember one occasion going in on a Monday to find a bag of potassium being fed into a humidifier