NHS blunders are occurring on an almost daily basis including hundreds where surgeons operated on the wrong body part, a new analysis shows.
NHS figures from April 2020 to March 2025 show ‘never events’ – serious, avoidable medical mistakes – occur at a disturbingly high frequency across the NHS.
Wrong-site surgery is the most common serious error, with 852 over the past five years, the study shows. These can leave patients with lifelong injuries, disability and the trauma of needing more surgery to put things right.
They include wrong organ removal, or ‘wrong-site’ surgery which includes carrying out a procedure on the wrong part of the body or even on the wrong patient.
Some of the most shocking cases were:
A fallopian tube removed instead of the appendix
A surgeon amputating the wrong toe
Medicine injected into the wrong eye
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