To make a claim against hospital

OP do you have any legal cover on your house insurance? You don’t have to use their solicitors ( even though they’d like you to!). With some experience in this area as a service user I imagine the hospital will agree a settlement quite quickly as the legal costs will very quickly dwarf the value of the claim.

Speak to a reputable lawyer in personal injury claims and take their advice.

Good luck.

From working in the nhs and with people that have made complaints I'd say you'll have a hard time getting anything from this other than maybe a half arsed apology. What's happened is bad but the outcome was fine, just a scar so I feel they'd say you'd have had a scar anyway so 🤷🏻‍♀️ I mean if you'd feel you'd get closure then maybe think about it but I'm not sure how far you'd get. Good news about your moles being all ok though 😁

Are you being dim on purpose? The initial mole was removed and lost. The only way to determine if it was in fact cancerous was to cut further round the initial scar and also go deeper. The OP will have the initial then a margin round it. Can you really not understand this?

Only becuase she couldn't get the result of the original one.

Get over it. It's not a big deal. Just be glad you are healthy.

That’s not how it works, but you need to raise a complaint first and as for their procedure on how they will deal with it.

I went privately for a test and the specialist told me it has come back ‘positive’ and I needed a biopsy for possible cancer. I decided to get a second opinion and took the results with me to the biopsy where the specialist said these test results show nothing abnormal at all therefore I did not need a biopsy.

I was shocked obviously and had been through a horrendous time so I complained. I got a refund from the hospital for the specialist’s fees and a letter of apology but not a refund for the lab results as that had been done externally and I had access to the results.

I’m not sure in this instance you will be able to claim because you don’t like the scar, they will claim the doctor you paid the doctor for his time most likely. Plus they will definitely not refund you for anything anaesthetic etc as those are sunk costs. It is worth putting in a complaint however to see the outcome.

The wide area excision was clear- IE didn't show any cancerous cells. This does not mean that the original biopsy was clear... It also doesn't mean it wasn't.

So, it does leave uncertainty. Had the hospital not lost the biopsy, then the OP would know where she stood. It's for this reason that hospital should provide some recompense to the OP- as I would assume she would have to act as if the biopsy was cancerous- with regards to additional check ups etc

@stillisHQ irrelevant

She's not claiming against the NHS. This was a private hospital.

Did you get any legal advice on your claim?

None of us really know this. As @lateatwork points out, the consequences of this are potentially quite wide ranging. Whether it would be stressful depends on whether the defendants would seriously resist the claim; given that the hospital has admitted to losing the sample and advised on the second operation as the only way of getting the check done, it may well be that they wouldn't.

It doesn't matter if it's medical negligence, it's negligence and also breach of contract. If you take money for this sort of procedure there is an obvious duty to ensure that you have a system in place to ensure you don't lose samples, precisely because having the samples checked is an essential element of the procedure, and because you know it will cause harm if you lose one

You have no idea how many chuckles your bizarre insistence on this non-point is giving the rest of us.

Let it go and get on and enjoy your life. Thank God, it wasn't cancerous

How? Are you really suggesting they could have taken a random sample somewhere else? This was a potentially cancerous mole, it's only the site of the mole that they can check because that is where they may find cancerous cells. They can't make the same incision there because, um, it's already been incised. They can only check that area by making a wider incision. Look at the original post, it was the hospital who said this would be necessary, not OP.

Absolutely this.

OP, you are better off posting on the Legal board with this sort of query. For some reason people on MN think it's immoral to claim damages for injury, and have no understanding of the fact that it is entirely normal to claim damages for pain, suffering, inconvenience and loss of time, and it's why people have insurance.

What always intrigues me is that they go quiet when you ask whether they seriously wouldn't contemplate claiming if they were in, say, a crash caused by someone else's negligence and suffered badly broken legs; and, if they would, why is that different from claiming for any lesser injury.

Op have the hospital taken responsibility for losing the sample? I was just thinking that where I am the sample would be sent away so you would need to work out where it got lost before being able to make a claim.

Try to get past what happened to you. You've got very little chance of claiming against the NHS. One individual against an enormous national organisation has no chance.

I was given the wrong drug (A Consultant himself later rang me and told me) which caused HUGE changes. There was a big investigation (The hospital itself ordered it, not me). They admitted their errors, apologised, that was it. Nothing else, no point.

What choice did she have given that they'd taken the original mole out? They could hardly do the same incision. It was the only way she could rule out cancer.

Only because they hadn't done their job properly in the first place. If OP hadn't had the operation there would always have been a concern that actually there was a malignancy which was not being treated. It's a choice that was forced on her, and it shouldn't have been.

You clearly don't know how they test for skin cancer

Stop whinging. You don’t have cancer, they didn’t charge you for the second excision.

What are you trying to achieve???

How on earth would claiming compensation involve any moral code? This is a commercial organisation insured by another commercial organisation, charging for work which it has failed to carry out properly and caused damage as a result. What is immoral about asking them to compensate for their failure?

If you bought, say, a microwave that was wired wrong and caused someone in the family to suffer burns, would asking for your money back and compensation for injury and the costs of having the injury dealt with be "looking for easy money" and breaking some moral code?

You don't know what the result of the first biopsy was- because they lost the sample. So, that sample may have shown that cancer cells were there- or not- and if they were there, they could have indicated what stage it was. The stage of the cancer determines how large the second cut would need to be.

So, now the OP is in the situation where she doesn't really know what the results of the wide area excision actually mean- it could be she had cancerous cells and they were all removed during the original excision, or it could mean that there was no cancer there in the first place. I don't think it's possible for the Dr to rule on either scenario as they lost the sample.

What I would want to check, is the likelihood of it was cancerous, whether the wide area excision is likely to show additional cancer cells or not. I think it's also important for future treatment to know what margins they cut so you can tell your new team.

It's the uncertainty that she can likely claim against?

I think the amount of compensation you could potentially recover would be tiny in relation to stress of pursuing a claim. I'd put this one down to bad experience & move on personally x