More than 40 children died under the care of Sheffield Children’s hospital last year – report

Sheffield City Council’s health scrutiny sub-committee will next week (June 5) discuss Sheffield Children’s quality account report in detail where – among many things – councillors will be able to ask questions about how the hospital is planning on learning from deaths that occurred under their care.

The authors of the report noted that “as of March 26, 2025, there had been 16 joint agency response investigations, 24 hospital case reviews and five patient safety incident investigations related to patient deaths”.

In addition, the report says, all deaths are subject to an internal Child Death Review and externally the Child Death Overview Panel.

The report added: “The outcomes of our Child Death Reviews include learning to improve future care and National Confidential Enquiry into Patient Outcome and Death (NCEPOD) grading to describe if and where there are elements for improvement.

“Of the 24 deaths that have been reviewed so far, 15 found good practice, eight room for improvement and one where the care was thought to be less than satisfactory.”

It is also reported that while the total number of patient safety incidents – these are unintended or unexpected incidents which could have, or did, lead to harm for one or more patients receiving healthcare – increased to 6,614 from last year’s 6,280, the percentage of patient safety incidents leading to severe harm or death only rose from 0.16 per cent to 0.21.

“The Trust has a very low number of incidents that have resulted in severe harm or death”, the authors added.

According to the report, the Trust received 169 formal complaints in 2024/25, compared with 196 in the previous year.

The main concerns (or themes) raised were clinical treatment, communication, waiting times, patient care and appointments.

However, 80 per cent of the complaints were responded to within the target timeframe agreed with the complainant, compared to 63 per cent in the previous year, “which is a significant improvement in response times”.

As to what has changed from last year, among other things mentioned in the report, the hospital said it was able to put emphasis on awareness and recognition of sepsis over the past year while improving the systems, enhancing training and supporting families by establishing a new mechanism.

The hospital also improved its bereavement services “to ensure families receive equitable and personalised support following the death of their child” – this included the hiring of a bereavement administrative coordinator and a bereavement support nurse.

More on this matter will be discussed at 10am on Thursday (June 5) at Sheffield Town Hall.