Britain based Zimbabwe nurses medical error kills two

Vongai Gondo

Two nurses involved in a medical error that led to two cancer patients being killed by a drug overdose at a Birmingham hospital are to go before a disciplinary panel.

IT specialist Paul Richards, aged 35, from Sutton Coldfield, and Baljit Singh Sunner, aged 36, from Stechford, died within hours of each other on Oncology Ward 19 at Heartlands Hospital after wrongly being given five times the dose of toxic drug amphotericin in July 2007.

Nurses Vongai Gondo and Catherine Kunatsa, who made up the prescriptions and did not notice the error, are now to face the Nursing and Midwifery Council’s investigating committee.

A panel will decide whether the actions were serious enough to warrant a misconduct hearing, which could see them struck off or suspended.

Junior doctor Dr Kiran Tawana, who wrote the prescriptions, received a formal five year warning from the General Medical Council for her part in the deaths but her actions were deemed “not so serious” to warrant a ban or suspension.

Mr Richards’ widow, mum-of-three Lisa Richards-Everton, from Walmley, said,

“I was shocked by the result of Dr Tawana’s hearing but the nurses now going before a professional panel is one more step towards some acknowledgement of the mistakes made.

She claimed,

“They gave both patients the wrong dose and made it up wrongly without alarm bells ringing. Someone has to be accountable for killing two people and wrecking the lives of two families.”

Dr Tawana and two nurses all exercised their right to refuse to answer questions at the inquest of the two men in February, when a jury ruled the deaths were accidental to which neglect contributed, with gross failures by medical staff to seek alternative advice or clarification on drug and dosage.

Confusion arose over drug Amphotericin because the original “conventional” form has a dose of about 1mg per kg of a patient’s weight, but modern forms have higher dosages.

A spokeswoman for the Nursing and Midwifery Council said: “The first stage in a case is the investigations committee, to look at the evidence and decide whether it will progress to a conduct hearing or not.”

Mrs Richards now has more than 500 signatures on a petition to Gordon Brown to improve the safety of prescribing drugs at: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Blunders/