Human fallibility occurs regularly – at home, at work and everywhere in between. We make errors all the time. Learning and sharing lessons from medical error is important to avoid them in future or mitigate the potential harm. We would encourage reporting mistakes to the Confidential Reporting System in Surgery (CORESS). This can be easily d one online via coress.org.uk. Nevertheless, we can never eliminate error completely, which is why in our view, the term ‘never event’ (defined by the NHS as a