A leading healthcare professional has said hospitals across mid and south Essex are not learning lessons from the past, following the publication of a list of errors.

At a meeting of health bosses on Friday considered the 66 serious incidents that have been reported in hospitals across the region between May and July.

Among the incidents initially reported were five categorised as “never events” – mistakes that should never happen – but that number has now risen to seven.

One of the newly reported events was an incident of wrong site surgery at the Mid Essex Hospital Trust, which had previously detailed how one patient’s finger was operated on accidentally and another patient had the wrong eye operated on.

Carol Anderson, chief nurse for the Joint Committee Team, said: “I have asked the trust to do a significant review of all the never events across the three hospitals. For me in particular with the wrong site surgery, we are just not learning lessons of the past.

“I have put a bid into Health Education England for some money to support a change of culture around how we embed the learning because what we are currently doing isn’t working and we also happen to have a public health registrar in mid Essex at the minute and I’ve taken advantage of that and asked if he will do a full review of all the never events that have happened across the group.”

The other never event that occurred since the list was published centred on failure to remove a swab after a patient gave birth.

Ms Anderson added: “Basildon in particular is flagging as a high reporter of never events and Mid-Essex is coming up quickly behind them. Southend must be doing something right because they are not reporting significant numbers of never events, so I have asked if they don’t look anywhere else, they look to Southend.

“The one thing I do think is positive is our local trusts have set themselves a zero tolerance target to never events, while some of the London hospitals have set themselves a target of 19.”

After details of the never events were published, a spokesperson for Basildon Hospital said: “Our staff work hard to make sure our patients get high quality care. We encourage staff to report any issues as quickly as possible so we can investigate thoroughly. These investigations help us understand what went wrong and how we can best stop it happening again in the future.”

A spokesperson for the Mid-Essex Health Trust said the trust has offered a “sincere apology” to those involved and are undertaking “rigorous investigations”.