By Luke Salkeld
Daily Mail (London)
Copyright 2006 Associated Newspapers Ltd.
All Rights Reserved
An ambulance crew drove a patient 200 miles in the wrong direction after relying on a faulty satellite navigation system.
They had been asked to shuttle the man between two hospitals in Essex a journey of less than ten miles.
But even after almost four hours of driving, it was not until the two-man team hit Manchester that they realised their mistake.
The blunder meant the journey, which should have taken 30 minutes, lasted more than nine hours.
Yesterday, there were calls for an inquiry into the error, which critics said was potentially ‘catastrophic’.
The journey began at 3am on Tuesday at King George Hospital in Ilford. But staff at the service’s control room waited four hours before contacting the team to ask why they had not arrived at Mascalls Park Hospital in Brentwood.
It is understood the crew said they were a ‘little lost’. The patient finally arrived at the mental health unit early on Tuesday afternoon.
Yesterday, there was disbelief that the crew had not realised they were heading the wrong way.
Michael Summers, of the Patients’ Association, said: ‘If this had been an emergency case, it could have been absolutely catastrophic.
‘It is very worrying to think that something like this can happen and hopefully the ambulance service has learnt from this error.’ He added: ‘This episode raises questions over why the service’s headquarters were not in touch with the crew much earlier.
‘Maybe the crew were new to the area, but after such a length of time one would think they might have used a bit of common sense.’ A London Ambulance Service spokesman said yesterday: ‘We can confirm a crew transferring a patient from King George Hospital, Ilford, to Mascalls Park Hospital, Brentwood, in the early hours of Tuesday morning were misdirected as a result of an error with the mobile data terminal on the ambulance.
‘We believe that the crew, who had not been to this particular hospital before, followed the directions given by the navigation system, without manually confirming their destination.
‘We understand that they reached the outskirts of Manchester before realising they were heading to the wrong destination.
‘The patient was in a comfortable condition at all times while in our care and he arrived safely at Mascalls Park Hospital early that afternoon.
‘The problem with the navigation database is now being fixed.’ Last night, Tory MP Eric Pickles, whose Brentwood and Ongar constituency contains the hospital the patient was being taken to, called for an investigation.
He said: ‘There needs to be an inquiry into what went wrong. It would have been quicker for the patient to walk to the hospital.’ He added: ‘Whenever we use this sort of technology we must remember to also use a bit of common sense.
This crew clearly did not.’ An estimated four million satellite navigation devices are in use sometimes with disastrous results.
Last month, a woman dodged oncoming traffic for 14 miles after misreading her satnav system and driving the wrong way up a dual carriageway.
In September, a taxi driver drove two girls 85 miles in the opposite direction after keying the wrong place name into his satnav.
A testing programme is now being developed by the Department for Transport which will check the reliability of equipment.