The result is that they are not monitored closely enough, causing at least 20,000 deaths each year. But consultants say that figure could be halved if high-risk cases were properly identified and transferred to intensive care.

They say the number of critical care beds devoted to post operative patients should be tripled from the 30,000 currently provided, while 50 per cent of patients should receive extra care. Britain has 0.6 critical care beds per 10,000 population compared to 4.4 per 10,000 in the US.

Shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley said: “This is a really critical issue for this country. We have chronically poor levels of intensive care compared with elsewhere.”

In the letter to Mr Johnson, seen by this newspaper, 17 eminent anaesthetists demand an overhaul of NHS surgical practices, warning that four times as many patients die in Britain after surgery as in the United States.

The doctors say the health service has failed to introduce simple tests to identify high-risk patients and challenge the health secretary as to why technology proven to cut deaths is used in a fraction of NHS operations.

One of the co-signatories, David Bennett, Emeritus Professor of Intensive Care Medicine at St George’s Hospital in London, said: “There are at least 20,000 patients dying after surgery across the UK – that is a very conservative estimate.

“We think we could halve the numbers dying, and save at least 10,000 lives a year, if patients were given the right support. This is a political decision. There aren’t many interventions that could have such a dramatic effect.”

Increased use of intensive care, combined with better monitoring, could save money by cutting patients’ time in hospital and preventing emergency re-admissions, he said.

Prof Bennett said that most hospitals had failed to invest in equipment such as fitness bikes, which help to assess the patient’s health prior to surgery, and blood-flow monitors, which maintain fluid levels and cardiac output during an operation.

Despite backing from NHS rationing body the National Institute for Curbing Expenditure (NICE), blood flow monitors are used on less than 10 per cent of patients.

Dr Bruce Taylor, honorary secretary of The Intensive Care Society said more patients should be monitored by intensive care before they became seriously ill. But he said there was “no slack at all in the existing system” to take on more patients without a substantial rise in funds.

From:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/26/nhs126.xml

On March 12, 2007 Health Direct posted: Medical errors- new campaign aims to reduce deaths and costs when a safety drive was launched by the labour government’s health watchdog in the face of “alarming” figures on the harm patients suffer in hospital and elsewhere.

Various studies, some using US data, estimate that there is a one in 300 chance of a hospital patient dying as a result of medical error.

One in 10 is estimated to suffer harm, of whom a third suffer serious harm, while studies suggest that 600 errors are made a day in primary care with more than one in 10 prescriptions containing errors.

And again on 4 Nov 05 Health Direct posted: NHS accidents cost £2bn and up to 34,000 lives finds National Audit Office (NAO) when according to a report by the National Audit Office, around a half of incidents in which NHS hospital patients are unintentionally harmed could have been avoided, if lessons from previous incidents had been learned.

Whilst reporting has improved at the local level, at the national level progress on developing a national reporting and learning system has been slower than envisaged in the Department of Health’s 2001 strategy “Building a safer NHS for patients”.