Coroner issues warning, saying few Covid patients may have died 'due to ventilator errors'

TWO Covid patients might have died due to staff errors while using ventilators, stated a media outlet citing a new coroner’s report.

Kishor Kumar Patel and Kofi Aning, 66, died at the Nightingale Hospital in the Excel Centre near Canary Wharf, east London, in April 2020. A new coroner’s report has claimed these deaths came as part of a "cluster" of similar incidents involving breathing system filters in the hospital's intensive care units, The Telegraph reported on Wednesday (14).

An inquest will reportedly examine these deaths, following claims that staff used the wrong ventilator filters though it has not yet been determined whether errors in operating the machines directly caused the death of the two patients.

Pointing out that this was “a serious incident” in which the wrong filter was found to have been used within the breathing systems of their intensive care ventilator, the east London Coroner Nadia Persaud has issued a warning about the risk of future deaths.

She added: "It is understood that these two cases came within a cluster of similar incidents."

The report, sent to the Royal College of Anaesthetists and the Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine, has raised concerns about the awareness level of intensive care clinicians and staff over different types of air filters.

"In my experience, few doctors and nurses working in ICU are knowledgeable about all these different filters and which ones should be used for any given breathing system,” Persaud said.

Pointing out that the “non-standardised colour coding used by manufacturers of these filters” along with different names for different types of filters often lead to an extremely confusing situation, the report added that an independent expert's recommendation that the classification and colour coding of the filters "is worthy of review, simplification, and standardisation".

"As there are still pressures within the ICU settings and in light of the imminent, planned reduction in Covid-19 safeguards, I consider that action should be taken to address this concern at the earliest possible stage,” the coroner said.

Barts Health Trust, which ran the Nightingale Hospital in London's Docklands, has reportedly  declined to comment on the matter.