East London, UK – 19th December, 2019: Yvonne Hewitt, of Woodford Green, 54, underwent surgery in December 2016 to fix her ureter, which was damaged in a previous operation, but was given a dose of lidocaine and had two heart attacks.
Nurses failed to notice she was having a heart attack for several minutes as the alarm in her heart monitor was muted. This led to her suffering an unrecoverable brain injury.
She died two years later from organ failure, but her family say they effectively lost her that day.
A serious incident report into the blunders at University College London Hospital (UCLH) revealed that nurses gave Yvonne a dose of lidocaine for pain control – a drug that had not been approved for use by the hospital’s use of medicines committee - that was meant for a patient who had an irregular heartbeat.
Yvonne’s sister Dianne said: “I feel like there was an institutional failure by the NHS in my sister’s case as she was failed from start to finish.”
Yvonne’s husband Owen added: “The operation seemed to have gone well but she said she was in a lot of pain. When I left her I told her to try to stay strong until the morning. The last thing that she said to me was that she was going to be okay.”
The family were later told that Yvonne had suffered a catastrophic brain injury.
“I just broke down”, Owen said. “I was saying that she was fine when we left her the previous night so how could things have gone so wrong?”
Dianne added that Yvonne’s mother, who was ill at the time, became so scared that she refused treatment, as she no longer trusted doctors. Subsequently her condition became terminal.
She said: “My mum refused to have any treatment for her condition or anything to do with hospitals after what happened to Yvonne. She never knew if Yvonne got better and Yvonne never knew if mum got better. But the truth is that my mum never got over what happened to Yvonne.
“She never got over it. Mum stopped fighting and I feel she died as a result of what the NHS did to Yvonne.”
Yvonne was eventually transferred to the Henry Nihill House care home in Edgeware. She was admitted several times to Barnet Hospital and died there in April this year from multiple organ failure.
Owen said: “I lost my best friend when Yvonne suffered that brain injury and my life has never been the same. How could they have given her a drug that wasn’t even approved and which led to her having two heart attacks? It is negligence of the worst kind and I am devastated by what happened.”
Stephanie Prior, head of medical negligence at Osbornes Law, who is representing the family, said: “It is simply inexcusable that Yvonne was given a toxic dose of an unlicensed and unapproved drug in intensive care - the place she should have been safest.”
A UCLH spokesperson said: “We would like to offer our deepest sympathies to Mrs Hewitt’s family and loved ones.
“We apologise unreservedly that she did not receive the standard of care that our patients expect and deserve.
“We investigated this thoroughly and have taken a number of steps to ensure that a similar case does not happen again.”
Source: https://www.guardian-series.co.uk/news/18113413.woman-suffers-catastrophic-brain-injury-given-overdose-unapproved-drug/