MEDICS at Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust operated or treated the wrong body parts on two separate occasions.

The “never events” ­— so called because they are so serious they should never happen ­— took place between April last year and March 31 of this year.

The trust, which covers Fairfield Hospital, recorded three serious mishaps during that time with the other relating to “unintentional connection of a patient requiring oxygen to an air flowmeter”.

Such failings, says NHS Improvement, which released the data, should not happen if national guidance or safety recommendations have been implemented.

Details of each specific incident or at which site they took place were not detailed by NHS Improvement.

Details of the serious mishaps at the Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust were revealed as it emerged hundreds of patients have suffered due to NHS blunders between April 2018 and July.

Some 621 “never events” occurred in NHS hospitals between April 2018 and July this year ­— the equivalent of nine patients every week. Instances include operating on wrong body parts.

Professor Derek Alderson, president of the Royal College of Surgeons, said such mistakes are “exceptionally traumatic for patients” while the Patients Association described them as “devastating”.

The figures show doctors have operated on the wrong body parts and left surgical tools (including surgical gloves, chest drains and drill bits) inside patients many times over.

One patient had the wrong toe amputated, while another had the wrong part of their colon removed.

Two men were mistakenly circumcised, while a woman had a lump removed from the wrong breast and two others had a biopsy taken from their cervix rather than their colon.