A patient in Umeå with long-term problems of anorexia was referred to the emergency room due to low potassium levels in the blood. Low potassium levels can lead to cardiac arrest.
At the emergency department, it was stated that the patient should be prioritized, but despite this, it took four hours before they received an assessment. By then, the blood counts had deteriorated to the point that the patient needed to be admitted urgently to the intensive care unit.
"Human factor"
"It was missed that the potassium value was low, why it was missed, I can't answer. Generally, in situations like this, it's human error," says Chief Medical Officer Johan Thunberg and continues:
"What we do in these cases is to create routines that allow, for example, to reduce the burden on the staff who have worked with the patient.
Could the miss have been about heavy workload?
"Some of this is certainly due to the high load, but that's not the complete explanation," says Johan Thunberg.
According to lex Maria notification Ivo, the care provider believes that the patient was exposed to a risk of serious medical injury.