Monday 12 October 2009

Grandmother, 72, has leg amputated after hospital wrongly diagnoses cancer

A 72-year-old grandmother had her leg amputated after being told she had cancer only to find out her leg was healthy all along.

Doreen Nicholls underwent the surgery in 2007 and now needs a wheelchair to get about. According to the Sunday Telegraph, the grandmother was wrongly diagnosed with an extremely rare form of cancer and was told that without a leg amputation, she would die.

Tests carried out after the operation revealed that her left leg, which had been cut off below the knee, was in fact healthy. Mrs Nicholls told the newspaper that the misdiagnosis, at Birmingham's Royal Orthopaedic Hospital, has destroyed her life.

Despite refusing to accept it was negligent in its treatment of Mrs Nicholls, the specialist hospital has agreed to pay her an out of court settlement which her lawyers described as a 'substantial six-figure sum'...
Source: The Daily Mail.

Thanks to JuliaM for alerting us.

3 comments:

Linda said...

The NHS insurance premiums must be sky high with all the pay outs for giant blunders they have to make!

Anonymous said...

I vowed never to have cancer treatment - particularly via the NHS. My Dad died of cancer and the chemo (not via the NHS) just made his last year utterly miserable.

Mark Wadsworth said...

LR, there was a statistic on that, the NHS pay out about half a billion a year in compensation, or half a per cent of their total budget. Make of that factoid what you will. Is it low or high? How does it compare to private sector? I have no idea.

F, I'm sort of agreed with that.