A new report by the patient safety charity, Action against Medical Accidents (AvMA) has found that Care Quality Commission ("CQC" - the national regulator of the NHS in England) is failing to take any action over NHS trusts who fail to implement patient safety alerts.
Although overall compliance with alerts has improved dramatically since the charity started publishing reports on this, information obtained under the Freedom of Information Act established that even the trust with the worst record - Southend University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust - had not received a single warning from the CQC or any other body over its non-compliance. Southend had failed to comply with a total of seven alerts as at the end of January 2014.
AvMA chief executive, Peter Walsh, said:
"Whilst we are pleased with the improvement in compliance, patients have the right to expect 100% compliance when it comes to patient safety alerts. These alerts deal with literally life and death issues and are meant to be mandatory. It is a scandal that some trusts are still prepared to ignore them and that the CQC and others have turned a blind eye."
AvMA's research found that there were 141 instances of alerts that were past the deadline as of 30th January 2014 but had not been implemented. This compares with 2,124 when they first reported in February 2010 and 455 in the previous report in August 2011.
However, every alert not complied with represents a serious risk to patients, and there are 14 examples of trusts who have still not complied with three or more patient safety alerts for which the deadline is past.
There were 13 cases where the deadline has been exceeded by over five years.
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