Ian Paterson recall of 11,000 patients

[smileylottie87]

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-england-birmingham-51369881

Patients were let down at every level and they are investigating 23 potential deaths caused by him.

That private hospital is a disaster and are also under investigation for an orthopaedic surgeon doing inappropriate shoulder operations-there is something seriously wrong there.

What is so awful is that this is not the first instance. Rodney Ledward caused huge amounts of damage to 100s of women in Ashford Hospital. There are so many parallels in terms of colleagues and managers not standing up to a bullying personality. I think there is a type of misogynist male doctor who enjoys their power over women, although in Morecombe Bay and Shrewsbury, midwives’ practice has been called into question.

I really don't understand how other staff didn't realise that some of these poor women didn't even have cancer? Would no one else be looking at the histology reports?

I don't understand either. I was discussing it with a colleague yesterday. A woman interviewed on radio 4 today had said she had a one stop appointment with him via the NHS initially. He sent her off for a mammogram and when she can back he told her she had cancer in both breasts. Then he told the NHS would involve a wait but he could see her privately and two days later she had a double mastectomy.

My colleague concluded that as the mammogram would have been normal the radiologist result would have gone in her notes but there would have been no reason for further NHS follow up. Meanwhile she was in the private system at his mercy.

Even so, one would think specimens would have been sent for histology. Maybe someone might have picked up on a number of normal breasts being sent to the lab. I don't know. Perhaps they weren't sent?

It's utterly appalling in every respect.

What concerns me most about this is that it is a system failure, I see it as a failure in safeguarding.
Amy profession where a client is potentially vulnerable to abuse is going to attract abusers, or risks creating a culture where abuse is permitted. They have a responsibility to be aware of this and to take active steps to deal with it.
All medical staff are loathe to criticize each other. I do understand that it would be unprofessional to criticize another member of staff to a patients face; but there needs to be a system in place for both patients and staff to flag problems, in complete confidence.

I think that when you have a sort of complex bureaucracy, it can be very very difficult to get rid of a bad apple, even one that is known. You see different versions of it in a lot of organisations. And people do start to just avoid the person.

I also expect many people who knew there was a problem still didn't imagine that it was such a bizarre and deliberate sort of evil conduct either. I mean, it seems so pointless, why would someone act that way?

From the same perspective though, when you get these individuals who are so abnormal in their thinking and behaviour, and also so deliberate, it's not easy to design systems that will catch them out. You design medical systems to catch bad doctors, or even exploitative ones. But ones who deliberately misdiagnose their patients and perform weird surgeries on them?

From the same perspective though, when you get these individuals who are so abnormal in their thinking and behaviour, and also so deliberate, it's not easy to design systems that will catch them out.

Prof. Spiegelhalter has written and demonstrated that, after the Shipman enquiry, it was possible to confirm that colleagues had reported concerns early on - and statistical tools would have validated their concerns.

Most strikingly, Spiegelhalter describes his experience designing a statistical model that, had it been implemented before the murders began, would have flagged up the alarmingly high mortality rate among Harold Shipman’s patients. He concludes that using his model would have stopped Shipman’s spree by 1984, saving 175 lives. www.spectator.co.uk/2019/04/i-could-have-stopped-harold-shipmans-killing-spree-and-saved-175-lives/

If anyone had been running a straightforward monitoring analysis of Paterson in both his NHS and private practices, I wonder if this would have shown up a long time ago and prompted an audit?

I keep hearing about Spire Hospital so I assumed they were private patients and he did it for the money. Is that too simplistic?

I keep hearing about Spire Hospital so I assumed they were private patients and he did it for the money. Is that too simplistic?

Some NHS hospitals contract with private hospitals for surgery patients to keep down waiting lists so I don’t think we know yet whether all the patients were private. I suspect money was a secondary motive but after all many NHS consultants combine private & NHS work but still offer patients a good service. It sounds to me as if he was more concerned with power.

I keep hearing about Spire Hospital so I assumed they were private patients and he did it for the money.

Just to agree with PPs that Spire also does NHS contract work:

www.nhsforsale.info/private-providers/spire-healthcare/

I could bear knowing more about monitoring standards for such contracted-out work.

Doesn't sound like a good idea for the NHS to use private hospitals then. I once told my sons doctor we were thinking of having an operation privately, he said don't do it because they aren't as safe if something goes wrong. Sounds like he was right.

Breast cancer surgery is not outsourced.

Here is the link to the report. There is a shockingly long list of women treated by him, some of whom are reported as being deceased.

Breast cancer surgery is not outsourced

Looks as if he referred NHS patients with insurance or means to pay for surgery to his private practice. Report says lack of communication between his NHS & employer made things worse.

www.gov.uk/government/publications/paterson-inquiry-report

I was one of the barristers who prosecuted the trial. Sadly many medics refused to give expert evidence. But Prof Philip Drew and Mr Ian Monypenny stepped up and explained why these operations were unnecessary. Medics need to call out colleagues if this is not to happen again.

twitter.com/nmbarraclough/status/1224740405243150337

The accompanying thread has some discussion as to why this might be (eg, professional fear of testifying against others; poor fee structure etc.).

Another two male doctors found to hate women