A colorectal surgeon who has been banned from working for a private healthcare company in England – after an investigation into patient safety – continues to work in the National Health Service (NHS), the BBC reports.
Nuffield Health stopped Marc Lamah from working in their hospitals, but he is still operating on patients for the University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust, while an NHS patient left with a twisted bowel after an operation by the surgeon says he should never work again.
Lamah did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment sent via his employer.
In January, the BBC reported that concerns had been raised about Lamah’s complication rate and that he was no longer practising at Nuffield Health’s hospital in Brighton pending an investigation.
A former employee said internal data showed one-third of Lamah’s patients had experienced a “moderate harm event”, where, for instance, a patient had to be transferred to another hospital or re-admitted over a 12-month period. The figure should be 5%.
In a statement to the BBC, Nuffield Health confirmed that after an independent investigation, the surgeon’s “practising privileges with Nuffield Health have been withdrawn”.
“His conduct did not meet the standards of medical practice and governance we expect. Patient safety is our top priority, and we hold all consultants to the highest standards.”
The University Hospitals Sussex NHS Trust, which runs the hospital where he continues to work, told the BBC that it had audited Lamah’s NHS data, which showed his outcomes were within the expected national range.
The trust is at the centre of a large police investigation, Operation Bramber, looking into at least 200 cases of alleged medical negligence.
Sussex Police are examining concerns about avoidable harm and cover-ups in the trust’s neurosurgery and general surgery departments between 2015 and 2021.
The trust runs seven hospitals across East and West Sussex and is one of the largest organisations within the NHS, providing care to a population of almost 2m people.
One patient, Sheryl Hunter, said she has suffered “five years of hell” after an NHS operation carried out by Lamah, and now has to manually excavate her bowels and has needed several emergency admissions.
She had suffered from endometriosis for a number of years, and in 2019 doctors decided she needed an operation to ease her pain.
Lamah said the best approach was to remove a part of her large intestine, the colon, and connect it to her small intestine.
A few days being discharged, she said she “felt something pop, and this awful fluid was coming out of me”.
Back at the Royal Sussex it was discovered the joint between the two intestines had torn, and for 10 days had been filling her abdomen with bowel matter, apparently a known complication of this type of surgery.
Despite that problem being resolved, she continued to suffer extreme pain for several years, necessitating repeated visits to both her GP and the Royal Sussex hospital.
Her GP wrote to Lamah repeatedly requesting he see her again, and Lamah eventually replied to say he had not received any previous letters.
But almost 12 months later, in December 2023, the GP wrote another letter urging Lamah to see her, but he refused.
Finally, in April 2024, she was seen by another consultant at a different hospital run by the same trust – the Princess Royal Hospital in Haywards Heath – when she found out what was causing her pain.
It was caused by a 180 degree twist on the small bowel causing an internal hernia and twisting the anastomosis (the surgical joint), said the discharge sheet given to Hunter by the hospital after the procedure.
“When they did the reconnection (of the intestines), they put it on backwards,” she was told. That creates a risk of rupture.
The trust said surgical error was presented as one of a range of possibilities, but an independent medical expert told the BBC the twist was “certainly a consequence of the 2019 operation”.
The trust said only a further operation would confirm if Lamah had made an error or whether the twist had occurred naturally.
However, the damage is now more extensive than it would have been had Hunter been treated earlier, and she has been told she will need pelvic reconstruction surgery before she can have another operation to try to fix her intestines.
She is on a waiting list for the first procedure and has spoken to Sussex Police about her experience.
In a statement, Professor Katie Urch, chief medical officer for the University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust, told the BBC it could not publicly discuss an individual’s care.
BBC article – Surgeon banned by private practice is working for NHS (Open access)
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