https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/02/20/patients-exposed-superbugs-nhs-safety-breaches-ppe/

Not a deliberate act of negligence – but a failure of process assurance. 150 NHS trusts.

A mass recall.

Disruption to operations already under pressure.

The detail that struck me: the products underwent a sterilisation process. But the minimum assurance levels couldn’t be verified. The documentation wasn’t there to prove it worked.

Sound familiar?

In my work as a Clinical Safety Lead in NHS digital transformation, I see a version of this regularly.

Technology suppliers who find assurance processes too onerous.
Who want to move fast, push updates, resist regression reviews.

And I genuinely understand the pressure they’re under – development cycles are indeed costly, timelines are tight, and clinical safety frameworks can feel frictional rather than foundational.

I’ve worked hard to continously recalibrate our approach – proportionate, risk-based, balanced.

But there is always pressure to go further, to relax standards, to trust that things will probably be fine.

Here’s what I know:

if we push safety assurance further down the development chain, we don’t eliminate the risk. We just lose our ability to manage

By the time a problem surfaces in a live clinical environment, the levers to enforce change are few and the patient is already in the room. We are playing “catch-up” trying to mitigate the issue, contain the impact, and inevitably it’s a quick fix.

The Medline recall wasn’t about a catastrophic technical failure. It was about undocumented calibration. A process gap. Exactly the kind of thing assurance exists to catch – before it reaches the patient.

That patient is always in my thinking. It’s why I won’t stop holding that line, even when it’s the harder position to defend.