A patient safety alert has been issued to NHS services that use ECG machines to diagnose cardiac problems, highlighting the risk associated with printing the wrong patient’s ECG records, which could lead to misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment.
The alert was issued after an incident where the ‘copy’ button had been pressed on the ECG machine instead of the ‘auto/start’ button. This resulted in a copy of the previous patients’ ECG results being re-printed; staff did not realise the error and labelled the ECG record incorrectly with the new patient’s identifiers. As a result, they underwent an unnecessary procedure and had a further complication.
