In a shocking media report, it was revealed that declared unsafe syringes from the UK found its way to the Indian hospitals. According to The Sunday Times, Graseby syringe drivers which had been banned by the UK’s state-funded National Health Service(NHS) were given to hospices and medical organizations in countries such as India, South Africa, and Nepal. The ban had followed a phased withdrawal of the devices from the NHS in 2010 following safety alerts dating back as far as 1995.
The newspaper revealed the details in a notice issued by the Isle of Wight NHS Trust in December 2011 which confirmed the replacement of all Graseby MS 16 and MS 26 syringe drivers in compliance to a Department of Health alert. The notice also said that the devices would be donated to a 3rd world charity.
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Apart from that official donation, the banned syringes were donated ‘informally’ too. A nurse from Somerset in England wrote in her 2014 blog that she had been allowed to take several Graseby drivers during her volunteering at an Indian hospital. In the same year, another doctor mentioned taking of those banned syringe drivers to Nepal during a charity medical expedition.
Peter Walsh, the chief executive of Safety Charity Action Against Medical Accidents doubted whether the countries or institutions concerned were fully briefed on the risks with those particular devices.
The contentious syringe drivers had been used at the Gosport War Memorial Hospital in Hampshire where Dr.Jane barton worked between 1988 and 2000. Last month, she was found responsible for the deaths of as many as 650 people as part of a culture in which opiates, or opium-based drugs, were recklessly prescribed.
The newspaper study revealed that the syringe pumps had been implicated in NHS deaths over a 30 year period.
Dangerous doses of drugs were rapidly infused into the bloodstream through the use of the banned syringe pumps.
Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt asked medical directors last month to make sure that the banned Graseby Syringe Drivers were no longer used in Britain.
In a 2011 programme, Abundant Life, conducted by the Rotary Clubs in the UK sent more than 100 Graseby Syringe drivers to South Africa’s growing hospice care community.
Rotary International in Great Britain and Ireland, however, defended the official donation of the syringes by NHS by saying that it was done in good faith and that it helped hundreds who otherwise would have suffered tremendously during their final stages of life.
The syringes were banned in New Zealand and Australia but in the UK it remained in use by NHS till 2015.
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