Intrathecal injection error

January 25, 2009

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Intravenous news: Hospital equipment that was partly responsible for an 18-year-old’s death has still not been improved eight years after his death, MPs have been told. Leukaemia sufferer Wayne Jowett died after a chemotherapy drug was injected into his spine instead of his veins at the Queen’s Medical Centre in 2001.

At a meeting of the Commons Health Committee last week, Professor Brian Toft, who held an inquiry into the teenager’s death, told the committee that the connector he recommended in 2001 to prevent the mistake being made again had still not been produced. He told the committee: “My conclusions regarding Wayne were that there had been procedure failures. There was inadvertent human error (that was certainly the case) but there was also systems failure.” The connector Prof Toft recommended would stop intravenous needles being mistakenly connected to spinal needles.

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