Has anyone ever been a victim of medical negligence?

[Crownjulees]

Following on from a post I saw on Facebook that said the nhs owes £50+billion in compensation to people who have suffered harm due to medical negligence, I wondered how common it is?

I work in medical negligence and the bottom line is that there are too many cases of serious failings (and bear in mind a claim will only succeed if failings are serious) . We get frustrated where we see the same errors repeated and we obviously see the consequences of those failings. Money will never undo what's happened but it can make life easier, get rehab and support etc and a claim can be a catalyst for change . The NHS needs to better use the data it has about failings to prevent more and work on being more efficient dealing with claims BUT equally bear in mind the number of errors and claims compared to the number of patients seen - it is only a minority - and many hospital Trusts are working hard at acknowledging failings and making improvements. Mistakes happen - its how they are dealt with that can make the difference.

These are shocking.

I don't think taxpayers having to pay compensation is the answer though.

Yes I guess so. My Dh took his own life three hours after being defined as ‘low risk’ (actually ‘no risk’ which is impossible) by a mental health team. How they came to that conclusion is difficult to tell as there are not really any notes, certainly no formal assessment.

Mistakes happen. The scale of operation in any healthcare system is enormous. I get very frightened by the downgrading of respect for medical expertise though. Medical training is demanding and expensive for a reason.

Yes me two years ago leading to being off work for a year and a half and bedbound. Muscle wastage all over my body leading to have to learn how to walk again.
Luckily for me my NHS boss let me work from home doing admin so I still got paid.
I am a medical professional and I was treated like shit.
I didn't sue, I just wanted to get on with my life. Had I lost my home and job I would have had to sue.
The replies to my formal complaints were defensive to say the least.

i have always believed that the negligence cases brought or complaints made are the tip of a very very big iceberg. Most people who should don’t complain or sue and that’s often understandable . The NHS complaints system operates in such a way as to to deter complaints and even when they admit mistakes/failings/errors there is no audit/ monitoring system in place to ensure that there is no repetition. The NHS culturally does not want to learn because it doesn’t really think it does anything wrong - we’re supposed to be grateful, say thank you and buy them chocolates. We need a grown up relationship - the NHS is something I pay for and I’m entitled to.

Yes @Bourdic I think you are right - many people don't take any action - for a whole host of reasons. Re complaints my experience is that some Trusts actually do deal with complaints very well and are open and do seek to learn from errors but I agree that we are not yet at the stage where all Trusts take that approach. I agree there is much more that could be done to audit and learn from mistakes - my own view is that is less about attitude and more about just not looking at and using resources properly to do this and not making it a priority, notwithstanding not just the human gain but the cost saving.

Similar here. My mum was told repeatedly that her weight gain, stomach pains, irregular toilet habits, heavy bleeding were because she was overweight, in menopause, post menopause, all sorts.

Turns out she was riddled with cancer that had metastasised from her ovaries to her bowel. She died. I complained and the doctors told me they had no records of any appointments where she had discussed it. The dates of the appointments were there, but the notes weren’t.

Humans will make mistakes, and when your job involves looking after living creatures, mistakes can be devastating, whether they're due to honest errors, negligence or arrogance. Excessive bleeding is dismissed as 'just' heavy periods far, far too often.
It doesn't only happen in the NHS. A close relative was misdiagnosed with a serious degenerative condition by a private consultant, but after a series of falls and stays in different NHS hospitals they began to suspect it might be something else, and he turned out to have a terminal illness. The inevitable outcome would have been the same, but had he known what was wrong earlier he could have bought equipment and made preparations to overcome the effects of the disease, which would have made his final weeks much easier for him.

My problem is that we have absolutely no way of knowing if Trusts do learn. They mark their own homework don’t they? Look at maternity services - the same ‘mistakes/errors ‘ have been made over and over again over decades now. Then the GOSH surgeon - I think both of those are about a deeply embedded culture within the majority of NHS organisations including GP surgeries

Not an unreasonable view! Yes we have a number of cases in both those categories and there are definitely steps that could be taken!

That’s awful. To know that someone has gone through and deleted notes. Well, that’s my assumption.

Health care professionals in some cases used to go on the basis that if you didn’t write it down, you couldn’t be done for it. However, it’s been at least 20 years since switching to ‘if you didn’t write it down you can’t defend it’. Not all have caught up, but the courts should have.

VERY common. Our local hospital basically killed my FIL, MIL and mother due to repeated gross incompetence, over several years.

It took the GP surgery 2/3 years to realise my DH had cancer - he'd literally never been near the surgery for a decade or more and then suddenly started having lots of different medical problems, meaning maybe a dozen or two dozen GP appointments over 2/3 years where they just constantly fobbed him off. It simply never occurred to them that something serious may be happening when someone who had previously not gone near the surgery suddenly going almost every month for different things. It took a locum to take a proper look at the notes and what symptoms my DH told them he was suffering from to order a special blood test which showed he had a rare form of bone marrow cancer. When we got the official diagnosis and "googled" his symptoms, they were text book for his cancer.

MIL, otherwise fit and healthy, got double pneumonia and was blue lighted to hospital the day after a GP appointment where the GP told us her chest was "clear", that was after 3 other GP appointments over the month due to her worsening breathing. She languished in A&E for 48 hours on a trolley in a corridor being completely ignored - we had to feed her, water her and take her to the loo. On the third day, she was finally taken to x-ray and then put on a ward, she was eventually put on IV drips, but died before they could take effect.

FIL languished on a ward for weeks as different doctors came, ordered more tests, (many repeated ones that had already been done) and just fobbed him off for another doctor to try to work out the problem on the next round. He lost several stones in weight, contracted a couple of hospital acquired infections, and was barely able to sustain the operation when they finally decided what was wrong with him and what needed doing. He just about survived it, but a couple of years later was diagnosed with cancer, and was in and out of hospital, again, several hospital acquired infections, before they finally did the operation they said he needed a year earlier (for cancer!!!) - this time he wasn't fit enough by the time they finally operated and he died shortly after the op.

When my mother went in for a hip replacement, her diabetes went out of control and she went into a hypo twice. Despite the fact she was diabetic being on her admission notes, along with a note of the medication she was on, apparently the ward nurses hadn't given her any diabetic medication nor done any blood sugar checks throughout her stay on the ward.

It's no surprise that there is such a rise in medical negligence complaints/claims. A lot of the staff and management don't seem to have a clue what they're doing and other staff end up picking up the pieces and fire fighting.

My son was. We sued. It took many years but they finally settled for a large sum that was invested and will see him set for life.

Nail on the head. The NHS has become a national religion where patients/relatives aren't allowed to complain "because it's free" and where the staff think they're saints for just doing their job (as seen with the pot banging during covid!). Even if they're not doing their jobs properly. In reality, far too many regard patients as nothing but "numbers" and don't look at the person as a human being anymore.

And yes, some hospital notes went missing, others were rewritten after the fact and the person who actually caused the life altering injury to my son apparently vanished into thin air.

The arse covering and rank closing was shocking to me at the time.

Didn't claim but could have..... 2nd born, I developed Sepsis during labour, I was known GBS positive and showing infection signs from being admitted to delivery ward. First Dr wanted to put me under GA to deliver as DS was in distress that decision was overruled and a watch & wait policy placed on me no antibiotics just paracetamol. 12 hours later I went into septic shock..... my DS was born with Sepsis, discharged after 3 days and readmitted the following day with suspected meningitis, it was the sepsis that hadn't been fully treated he was in for a further 2 weeks and a very poorly boy. I was visited by 2 senior consultants on the ward to "discuss" but thats all.
Bitter sweet for me as whilst the could and have should have acted faster, they also saved both our lives and the treatment we received was fantastic.

I think something fundamental shifted with Covid and it hasn’t been reset. Not that things were fine before then but somehow if now feels existentially different.

Yes - me, my mother, my son, several friends and their parents...we were just too broken to sue the NHS. So despite what they pay out, I'm sure they save billions because so many people are too poor/broken to actually add to the trauma by bringing a claim against them.

The system isn't "set up to care and protect". It's a massive exercise in arse covering with some vague attempts at healthcare in between.

I was repeatedly told my pain was in my head, that if I lost weight Id be fine, that asking for pain relief was "drug seeking behaviour".
I had spent a year in bed unable to move before I finally managed to get surgery and it was found I had congenital hip dysplasia that had never been diagnosed and my hip/pelvic bones on one side had completely collapsed. It was a very big operation to cobble it all back together but you know my GP knew best....I was just a neurotic overweight middle aged woman complaining about nothing.
I gave him such shit when I got out. I didn't hold back.

@Gettingbysomehow How did the GP respond, if you don't mind my asking? Did you get an apology?

The first time my friend was back in her GP practice after surgery for her brain tumour, she asked them to annotate all the entries over the previous three years when she had been reporting symptoms but was sent away without investigations. Now, she was quite calm about this and recognised of course that no reasonable doctor is going to push the red button the first time a woman in her 20s comes in with a single symptom, but by the time she had been coming back multiple times with unilateral hearing loss and balance problems, she should have been investigated much,much earlier. She is living with much more significant disability as a result.

Not me personally. But I used to work in a hospital and know of 2 instances of it.

1. When I was covering at a weekend, I had a seriously distressed woman ring the hospital, trying to track down her medical records. She had had laser eye surgery and had been blinded by it. And both the hospital and the surgeon covered it up. It was awful.

2. A senior nurse co-signed off on some meds for a patient (patient was fortunately unharmed) which were expired. The senior nurse then altered the medical records and got the other, less senior, nurse sacked. Totally avoided any consequences. Again, all covered up.

Very defensive, no apology.

I know hindsight is great but I print off my consultation notes, test results etc via the NHS app and scan them into a file on my computer so if anything ever went wrong I'd have copies before any staff could change them.