William Hannah, who was 68 years old and hailed from Bolton, England was recently admitted into the Salford Royal Hospital to receive necessary treatment.
No one could have expected that a tragic switch would occur during this time that would cause him to lose his life.
In September 2017, Hannah had been involved in a bad car accident that resulted in multiple fractures and a traumatic brain injury.
The Salford Royal Hospital was where he had been regularly receiving treatment for the conditions that arose as a result of the accident.
He eventually needed the use of a ventilator, and at one point, he was diagnosed with a lung infection.
In order to clear out Hannah’s lungs and promote better breathing, Hannah would have to undergo a bronchoscopy.
This is what he arrived at the hospital for on this fateful day, and he soon went under the knife.
But during the procedure, an inconvenience came up when the doctor noticed that his equipment trolley didn’t have any saline solution in it.
It was this solution he needed to clean out Hannah’s lungs.
The doctor called for a healthcare assistant and asked them to get some saline solution and pass it to him.
The assistant went off to find the right solution, and he soon chanced upon an unlabeled bottle in what looked like the right color.
So he passed the bottle to the doctor, who went on to use what was inside the bottle to wash Hannah’s lung out.
But then, the doctor realized that a huge mistake had been made.
The assistant who went to fetch the saline solution had been confused and accidentally took a bottle filled with detergent, a cleaning solution toxic to a human’s system.
He had essentially used the detergent to fill and clean Hannah’s lungs instead of the needed saline solution, with disastrous results.
The doctor did not notice this misstep right away, either.
Instead, he only became aware that something was wrong when he was done and went to clean off his surgical equipment.
Knowing how deadly the error made was, the doctor hurried back to try and remove the chemical from Hannah’s body, but by then, it was too late.
Hannah passed away 33 hours after the fatal treatment.
According to the Hannah family’s lawyers, the doctor needed to use Endozime AW, a bright blue solution, but wound up using Lancer neutral detergent solution, a light blue solution, instead.
While the exact cause behind Hannah’s passing is still being investigated, the Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust has done their own investigation and found that Hannah did not receive the “high standards” of medical care that the hospital aims to deliver.
This investigation found that the hospital failed to maintain a good amount of stock of their necessary equipment, while staff did not receive sufficient training and bottles were not well-labelled.
The hospital also admitted to less-than-ideal communication between staff while a mandatory risk assessment from the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations wasn’t present.
This hospital is now working to ensure similar incidents never happen again, but Hannah’s daughter, Lisa, is dissatisfied with what they have done thus far.
The hospital faces a malpractice lawsuit from the Hannah family.
