Leicester trust hit with £620k fine for A&E target and never event failures

The East Midlands trust missed its target of seeing 95 per cent of A&E patients within four hours in October, achieving only 92 per cent.

The trust has only met the target three months out of the past seven.

In light of this, Leicester City Clinical Commissioning Group has issued a contract penalty worth £616,000.

Jeremy Tozer, the trust’s interim director of operations, said it recognised it needed to do more to improve the speed of assessments such as x-rays and blood tests.

However, he said activity had increased. “Between April and October, compared the same period last year, demand has increased 4.6 per cent to 450 attendances a day,” he said. “That is approximately 23 up on last year.”

He said much of the increase came in early evenings when the trust’s ability to deal with and discharge those patients was reduced, meaning many had to be admitted.

Meanwhile the CCG has also levied a penalty worth £6,513 against the trust after nine never events were recorded since 2009, six of them this year.

In April a patient had a lens fitted in the wrong eye while another patient had the wrong finger operated upon; in May the wrong tooth war removed from a patient; in July a naso-gastric tube was inserted into a patient’s lungs and in August a patient received the weekly dose of a medicine twice in two days.

The latest incident in October involved a needle breaking during surgery, with a piece being left inside the patient.

The trust has now established a task and finish group to learn from the incidents and drive improvements.