The birth of Elise Cattle's first child was traumatic. A so-called back-to-back birth – in which the baby's spine is against the mother's, making labour longer and more painful – meant the delivery saw her incur a fourth-degree tear, the most severe type that can occur in childbirth.

But, as the weeks went by, rather than the pain subsiding, she remained crippled with it.

'I couldn't walk until my son was five weeks old, and I physically couldn't sit down,' recalls Elise, 37, from Hull. 'I'd have to lie down.

'If my son needed his nappy changing, I had to have him laid across my stomach, then pass him to a family member to be put back down. Because it was my first child, I didn't know any different. I thought that's how painful it should be after having a child.'

When she raised her concerns with midwives and her GP, she was reassured that this was to be expected. 'They just kept telling me, "You've got an infection, it'll get better," Elise says. 'I was literally going to the doctor every week. Some weeks I'd be on three different lots of antibiotics.'

Four months later, however, Elise, now a full-time mother of four, was still in agonising pain. Bleeding regularly, she began to notice a putrid smell. 'No matter how much I washed, I couldn't get rid of this smell,' she says. 'My mum came with me to the doctor, and she said, 'She needs looking at now, because this isn't normal.'

An examination soon revealed the cause – while stemming the bleeding post-birth, the medical team had left a cotton swab inside her. 'The GP pulled it out there and then,' Elise says.

And yet nothing improved. 'The doctor just left it at that, but I still continued to bleed. I kept going back, and getting put on more antibiotics for infections.'

Eventually, a full eight months after giving birth, her GP finally agreed to send her for a scan. It revealed that it hadn't just been the one rogue swab – in fact, multiple swabs remained inside her.

'I'd given birth in the August, and these swabs didn't get removed until the following April,' says Elise. 'It was ongoing for eight months. Constant pain and constant bleeding, and not being listened to.'

At the time, she was in her early 20s. Now, 13 years on, Elise remains deeply affected by the experience, both physically and mentally. Indeed, the presence of the

swabs left her with permanent physical damage. 'I still have a lot of pain from all the scarring,' she says. 'I never fully healed.'

Such cases of 'retained foreign objects' – the term given when pieces of medical equipment are mistakenly left inside patients during operations or procedures – are classified by the NHS as so-called 'Never Events', catastrophic and preventable medical errors which should not happen if safety guidelines are followed.

Yet they still do. NHS England figures released last week show that 403 Never Events took place between April 2025 and March 2026, including 121 cases of retained foreign objects. NHS doctors and nurses left items inside patients which ranged from swabs and cotton wool balls to guide wires, surgical instruments and even surgical gloves. Such events inevitably cost the NHS dearly in compensation settlements. Elise later received £7,500 from Hull and East Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust.

'Elise's case highlights how completely avoidable errors in hospitals across the country can have a massively damaging impact on the lives of patients and their families,' says Matthew Gascoyne, a senior solicitor at Hudgell Solicitors who represented Elise.

'These should have been happy times for Elise to cherish. However, her memories of this time are of being in intense pain and unable to do anything for her son.'

So why do these mistakes happen? According to Dileep Lobo, professor of gastrointestinal surgery at the University of Nottingham, who has carried out research on cases of retained foreign objects and how to prevent them, the predominant reason is simply mistakes made when counting.

'At the end of the day, it all amounts to human error,' says Professor Lobo. 'With instruments, the nurses count the instruments at the start and at the end of the operation, to make sure they're all taken out. Every now and then we get a Never Event, and it's a matter of paying attention to detail.'

A more effective way of avoiding such Never Events would be a post-surgical scan. Professor Lobo says that the majority of items used in these procedures – are all electronically tagged, meaning that their presence in the body could be detected on an X-ray or CT scan. Yet for cost reasons, such scans are not routinely used.

'The Americans have got systems where they can scan the body and make sure there are no swabs left in, but we don't have that in the UK at the moment,' says Lobo. 'If the swab [or instrument] count is incorrect, the surgeon will have a look inside the body cavity. If we don't find the missing swab, then we will have an X-ray done.'

Yet if everything is thought to have been accounted for, it can take weeks or even months for doctors to notice anything is amiss. This was the experience of Michaela Hayden from Erdington, Birmingham, when her four- year-old son Kumarie had a fall at home, resulting in three pieces of glass becoming embedded in his left knee.

Following an operation at Birmingham Children's Hospital to remove the glass, she noticed that the wound didn't appear to be healing properly.

'Every time my son went for his check-ups, I mentioned it to the consultant and he was basically fobbing me off,' says Michaela.

'He put it down to swelling from the operation. It wasn't until the last appointment before they were going to discharge him that I spoke to a different consultant because I was fed up. She requested an X-ray and they found out there was a foreign object in his knee.'

It turned out that the surgeon had left a small plastic cap from one of the operating instruments used for the procedure within the closed wound.

It would require a follow-up operation to be removed and now, nearly ten years on, Kumarie lives with sustained muscle weakness in his knee.

His mother hopes that it will eventually heal by the time he reaches adulthood, but this is far from guaranteed. She believes his problems were exacerbated by having additional surgery.

'His knee is really weak,' she says. 'Now he's getting older and taller, you can notice in the way he walks, and the fact he's scared to do certain activities at school because he doesn't want it to give way.'

According to Professor Lobo, when medical equipment is left in a patient, it can delay wound healing and trigger the body's natural defence mechanisms, leading to the formation of dense scar tissue around the object.

But the most common consequence is infection, the likely source of the foul smell reported by Elise Cattle.

'Foreign objects do cause infections,' Professor Lobo says. 'That happens within days to weeks, and then you can form an abscess around it.'

In extreme cases, the abscess can burst, spilling infected pus and bacteria into the body and triggering inflammation. This is a life-threatening emergency which requires hospitalisation, intravenous antibiotics and surgery.

Professor Lobo points out that this does not always happen.

Teflon, for example, which is used in hernia repair operations or in complex vascular bypass procedures, creating an artificial route for blood to flow through when the natural vein is blocked, is a chemically inert substance, meaning there is less of a reaction to its presence.

Cotton swabs, on the other hand, do trigger a far more profound response as the body's complex biological systems perceive the material as a threat.

In Kumarie's case, Birmingham Women's and Children's NHS Foundation Trust admitted full liability, both in failure of duty of care and causing injury, and agreed an out-of-court settlement with the Hayden family.

While medical errors have always happened, there are concerns that serious patient safety issues are on the rise.

NHS England data reveals that there were 84,800 incidents within the health service that either proved fatal or caused moderate or severe harm between October 2014 and September 2015.

However, a decade on, this figure had more than doubled, with 182,359 such incidents taking place between October 2024 and September 2025.

Healthcare representatives suggest this increase may reflect better detection of serious patient safety breaches rather than a decline in care quality.

However, patients currently pursuing legal cases against the NHS are concerned that standards are slipping. Trevor Wills, 67, who's currently taking civil action against the NHS through the law firm Leigh Day, describes having to undergo three operations, two of which were unnecessary, but which took place after surgeons left multiple foreign objects inside him.

Trevor first underwent life-saving surgery on his buttock in the summer of 2020 after developing Fournier's gangrene, a rare flesh-eating bacterial infection. Over subsequent months, the wound did not heal as expected with a scan then revealing the presence of a surgical dressing mistakenly left inside.

'They took me back into hospital, opened me up, took the dressing out, and apologised profusely,' says Trevor.

'At the time, because it was Covid, I kind of put it down to the stress they were all under.'

As he recovered from the second procedure, Trevor began to develop repeat infections which refused to go away, even with intravenous antibiotics. On his wife's insistence, he went back for another scan.

'This time, they found that a sponge had been left in the wound,' he says.

'Initially they implied that it had been accidentally left in during the second operation.

'Then they suggested it had also been left in during the first operation, but missed when they took out the dressing in the second operation.

'Either way, it was pretty much incompetence, and at that point I said, "OK, once I could forgive, but for it to happen twice, there's a problem." They're just not being thorough.'

After undergoing a third operation, this time to remove the sponge, Trevor says he developed muscle atrophy because his movement had been restricted for such a prolonged period of time. It would take him until early 2023 before he was able to walk unaided again, almost three years after the first operation.

Both Trevor Wills and Elise Cattle describe a sense of disbelief about what happened to them. Karolina Saulys, 33, from Derbyshire, feels the same. In October 2024, she gave birth to her first child, and required an emergency procedure after suffering a grade-three tear and significant bleeding.

Over the following weeks and months, she began to realise the pain was not subsiding and in fact, was only intensifying, making it impossible to stand. It took seven weeks for doctors to realise that a large swab had been left inside her during the procedure.

'I couldn't care for my daughter,' says Karolina. 'I couldn't even take her for a walk. My husband had to go back to work, so my dad had to come over from abroad and stay with us.'

A former NHS employee herself, she describes struggling with ongoing emotional distress and guilt as a consequence of what happened, and is now pursuing a case against the NHS through the legal firm Switalskis.

'I feel so betrayed and disappointed,' she says.

'I missed a lot during those early months of my daughter's life, because when you're in that much pain, you are frustrated and angry. The only relief would come when I was lying down.'

NHS representatives told the Daily Mail that while retained foreign body incidents following surgery remain extremely rare, they should always be treated seriously, with steps taken to learn from the incidents and improve care for future patients.

An NHS spokesman said: 'Patients deserve the best and safest possible care, and – while we recognise there is more to do – we are supporting frontline teams to improve, including through nationwide training, better recording and response to incidents, and rolling out initiatives like Martha's Rule [the newly established right to a second opinion if a patient is deteriorating] to prevent harm and save lives.'

However, for those who have experienced long-term harm as a consequence of such avoidable medical errors, there is a

sense that patient concerns are still not always treated with adequate seriousness.

Looking back, Elise feels she is lucky to still be alive.

She points out that the infections which stemmed from having multiple swabs left inside her for eight months could have easily resulted in deadly blood poisoning known as sepsis.

'We need more awareness of these cases, so that doctors and nurses actually stop and listen to what patients are saying,' she says. 'As a first-time mum, I just got fobbed off, and I could have got sepsis.

'It could have killed me. In fact I don't know how I didn't die.'