Healthy Limbs Amputated, Wrong Kidney Removed: UKs Medical Victims By Margareta-Erminia Cassani http://www.moonbowmedia.com 11-20-00
LONDON (AFP) - Twenty-seven year old Vicki Gilbert has one leg. Doctors in the northern English city of Birmingham amputated her other leg for a bone cancer she never had. Horror stories like Vicki's, where British patients are left permanently scarred through medical error, are slowly but surely filtering into the news here, with associations springing up to fight for the rights of the victims. There's the case of Jennifer Cormack, a 63-year old nurse who underwent a double masectomy -- for breast cancer she never had. In another much-publicised accident, 70-year old Graham Reeves died in January after doctors at a hospital in Wales removed his one healthy kidney, and left him with the one they were supposed to take out. "It's been very much a hidden problem," says Liz Thomas, policy and research manager at Action for the Victims of Medical Accidents (AVMA). "Until this year there really has been no acknowledgement that it is a real problem within the NHS, that adverse events happen in every (hospital) trust across the country every day." Now, Thomas says: "We have had a first step. They have recognised that mistakes are being made." What is hard is getting the health authorities here to tackle the problem, she says. Last year the National Health Service (NHS) was forced to pay out 400 million pounds (570 million dollars) to compensate the victims of medical accidents. Officials estimate it could be liable for another 2.4 billion pounds (3.4 billion dollars) from existing claims. Vicki has been awarded 1.2 million pounds (1.7 million dollars) in compensation. She is not the only one to get some form of financial recognition of her fate. Since the beginning of this year, the courts here have ruled in favour of three other victims of medical error. The authorities here are only too aware of what effect medical error horror stories have on public confidence in the NHS, the country's biggest employer with a workforce of one million. Chief Medical Officer Liam Donaldson decided to play it clean -- and hopefully regain trust -- in June when he had a report published detailing medical error. The report was called an "Organisation with a Memory" -- and memory was precisely what it said hospitals did not have. It said reports on medical accidents were sent out to so many different bodies that the information hardly ever got to those on the frontline, the hospital staff, and vital lessons are not learnt. When an accident happens, the authorities want a quick scapegoat -- a doctor or a medical officer to blame -- but not enough attention is paid to the conditions in which the accident took place and which could have caused it, the report said. It said there was a "blame culture" which could "encourage people to cover up errors for fear of retribution and act against the identification of the true causes of failure." Many here point to understaffing problems in the health service and the fact that doctors and nurses are often overworked and exhausted. Thomas agrees. "The evidence will suggest that if you are running wards with fewer staff... there are chances you are going to get more accidents taking place." There are currently vacancies for 15,000 nurses in the British health service. Emma and Ed Fogg have experienced the tragic consequences of staff tiredness firsthand. The couple recently recounted in the British press the night they took their 22-month old son Jacob to hospital in London. He was running a temperature and appeared lethargic. They were seen by a doctor so tired "he was blinking to stay awake and had tiredness blotches under his eyes." The doctor said their son had a simple case of influenza. A few hours later, Jacob was dead. He was in fact suffering from meningococcal meningitis -- an inflammation of the membranes covering the brain and spinal cord which has fever as one of its early symptoms. MainPage http://www.rense.com
