Patient safety commissioner still has ‘concerns’ about health board at centre of Eljamel scandal

The Patient Safety Commissioner for Scotland has said she is “not confident” that an Eljamel-style medical malpractice scandal will not be repeated in Scotland.

And she said “families are lied to” within the NHS.

Disgraced surgeon Sam Eljamel harmed patients in NHS Tayside by carrying out botched operations.

Victims of the medic, who was carrying out procedures above his qualifications, have been left with lasting damage and a public inquiry is ongoing.

Speaking in the Scottish Parliament, patient safety commissioner Karen Titchener said the culture of “closing ranks and shutting things down” in NHS boards means she is “not confident that it wouldn’t happen again”.

She said she did not want to “dirty the waters for the inquiry”, which was ordered by former first minister Humza Yousaf, but said “there are still concerns” about NHS Tayside.

Titchener said: “We have to start trying to open doors that have been closed and trying to stop boards closing rank and stopping things, because there's nothing safe about that.”

The former nurse practitioner is the first person to hold the new commissioner role. Calling for greater transparency, she said “it's ongoing that families are lied to, and that staff are shut down” within the NHS, and that whistleblowing must be supported.

Titchener said: “We've got to stop it at the first whisper that [says] ‘hang on, this feels like another Eljamel.

“We’ve got to try and stop it earlier. And I'm not sure we're doing that yet.”

Appearing before the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee, Titchener said she would go “straight to the top” and report any concerns of dangerous practice to the health secretary.

Sandesh Gulhane MSP said he had “come across a surgeon who was not competent to be performing the operation that he was doing” through his work as a doctor.

Referring to the probe into failings at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow, where deficiencies with the building are thought to have contributed to the deaths of patients, Gulhane said: “This culture of secrecy within health boards, the culture of shutting down staff and gaslighting families, this isn't new to the Queen Elizabeth scandal, this has been going on and on and on.

“I've been in the NHS for almost two decades and it's been there the entire time that I've been there, and it's because our management are working with complete impunity. Nothing affects them at the end of the day – when scandals break, something happens, they move on to the next [thing], and nothing is happening to the management. So what can you do to actually hold management to account?”

Titchener said, “accountability is the biggest failing because people hide behind the institution”.

She told the panel: “If we're brushing things under the carpet nothing's going to change and care isn't going to be better.

“Scotland does do a lot of things well, so let's make sure patient safety is actually, at a global level, recognised.

“I want Scotland to be the safest place in the world to have surgery, to go to the A&Es, so we've got to do that together. My office is very small, but, but it will be very influential, and it will be a mighty army.”