Ian Paterson victim calls for patient safety to be prioritised

Debbie Douglas was instrumental in getting the independent inquiry into disgraced surgeon Ian Paterson established

A woman who underwent needless surgery at the hands of convicted surgeon Ian Paterson said patient safety was still not being prioritised.

Paterson was convicted of 17 counts of wounding with intent in 2017 and was jailed for 20 years.

Debbie Douglas, who now campaigns for his victims, said more still needed to be done following a damning report.

In December, the Department for Health said it was making "good progress" on changes.

The inquiry, published in 2020, made 15 recommendations and Ms Douglas called on health chiefs to "get on" with the improvements.

"It's three years and technically none of the recommendations are closed," she said.

"It's all around patient safety and it's not being given the priority it deserves."

The Court of Appeal increased Paterson's prison sentence from 15 to 20 years

Between 1997 and 2011, Paterson is known to have treated thousands of patients at Spire Parkway hospital and Spire Little Aston hospital in the West Midlands.

The former surgeon, originally from Bangor, County Down, subjected hundreds of patients to needless and damaging surgery over 14 years.

He also worked at NHS hospitals run by the former Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust.

Last week, Spire announced it was recalling a further 1,500 of Paterson's patients after a trawl of IT systems.

The 2020 inquiry had already recommended all 11,000 of his patients be recalled for review.

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"We must get the recommendations closed out - not to rush it, but we've had three years," Ms Douglas said.

"What frustrates me, is at the end of every December we're told we will get another update, next December.

"We can't keep going on year after year, with nothing closing out."

'An outlier'

She said it was particularly urgent for more information to be made available on the online private healthcare information network (Phin) database.

Phin is designed to track the performance and fees of private consultants and hospitals, but is not due to be completed before 2026, which Ms Douglas said was "ridiculously long".

"The database now shows the consultant's name and very little else," she said.

"It doesn't say whether they've had any suspensions... it doesn't show metrics on numbers of operations.

"Had that been around during Paterson's time, they'd have picked Paterson up as an outlier.

"For me, that's a really key thing to have, both for the hospitals to look at and for patients to look at before they make a decision on which consultant they should use."

Dr Cathy Cale, Spire's group medical director, previously said it was "fully committed" to implementing the 2020 review's recommendations which it had accepted.

And in December 2022, health minister Maria Caulfield said "good progress has been made" on making the necessary changes.