Broken or malfunctioning medical equipment has been linked to more than 300 patient deaths in England during the 2024/25 and 2025/26 financial years, according to figures reported on 18 October 2026. The incidents include defibrillators with dead batteries, oxygen masks set up wrongly and missing resuscitation components. The records do not show whether faulty kit directly caused each death.

NHS Equipment Failures Recorded on National Safety Database

Each case was logged on the Learn from Patient Safety Events service, which the NHS says is intended to 'make patient care safer'. That caveat matters: a death linked to a failure is not necessarily a death caused by it. The system has operated in every NHS trust in England since November 2024 and captures more than three million events a year.

Key facts: More than 300 fatal incidents involving medical devices were recorded in England during the 2024/25 and 2025/26 financial years. The database does not establish whether the equipment directly caused each death. Separate NHS England figures released in 2025 recorded 87 deaths following equipment-malfunction incidents since 2022.

A spokesman for the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency said staff must receive proper training on medical equipment, and that devices need appropriate monitoring and maintenance.

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Earlier Figures Pointed to Defibrillator Problems

Those 2025 figures, first reported by The Guardian on 9 June 2025, covered 3,915 equipment malfunction incidents since 2022, of which 87 were followed by a death. One involved a defibrillator advising a paramedic not to give a shock.

Others included an emergency alarm system failing on a neonatal ward and the camera on an intubation device going dark. Most incidents caused a low level of harm, while 68 patients were severely harmed and 522 moderately harmed. The law firm Kingsley Napley, summarising the data, said 32 per cent of the 87 deaths recorded involved defibrillators and 14 per cent involved breathing equipment and tubing.

Paul Whiteing, chief executive of Action against Medical Accidents, called the statistics 'shocking' at the time and said they showed the scale of harm caused by years of underfunding in the health service. The two sets of figures cover different periods, so they are not directly comparable.

Oxygen and Defibrillator Warnings Predate the Latest Figures

Concerns about equipment are hardly new. In January 2023, NHS England issued a patient safety alert identifying 120 incidents in a year linked to oxygen cylinders, including cylinders that were empty, not switched on or inappropriately secured. NHS England reviewed 43 incidents that had been graded as involving moderate harm, severe harm or death, alongside a sample of lower-harm and no-harm reports.

The regulator has previously said oxygen concentrators and the regulators used with cylinders count as medical devices, and that its incident database does not necessarily show the events described were caused by the device.

A coroner's prevention of future deaths report on the judiciary website raised a related issue with community defibrillators. It said an ambulance service had no way of knowing a device in a co-op store was offline, and that no single database lists the location and status of such machines.

Whether the new total reflects worsening NHS equipment failures or simply better reporting is not something the database can say. The figures highlight the importance of reporting equipment-related safety incidents, maintaining medical devices and ensuring staff are trained to use them.

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