14
Sep 2021
Health board issues apology over failure to monitor prostate cancer patients
The Public Services Ombudsman for Wales has found that failures by a health board led to eight cancer patients not being properly monitored or included in treatment targets after being referred to England.
Of the 16 patients on Betsi Cadwaladr health board’s prostatectomy waiting list in August 2019, eight were referred to England for treatment and none of those treated in England met the health board’s targets.
The health board has apologised to the patients, said it had accepted the findings of the report and agreed to implement its recommendations.
The target treatment time for non-urgent suspected cancer cases is 62 days and 31 days for urgent cancer cases. The Public Services Ombudsman for Wales said if patients had been treated in Wales, target breaches would have been reported. Four of the patients treated by the health board exceeded the cancer waiting time target, which led to the reviews.
Nick Bennet, Public Services Ombudsman for Wales, said “Clearly there’s consequences for any type of cancer treatment, where people who are treated in England do not receive the same monitoring, do not receive the same harm reviews. Going forward, this must never happen again.”
He added that whilst there was no requirement to carry out reviews or produce reports for patients treated in England, the “geographical location of treatment should not have left these eight patients in a position where they were denied the harm review process because they were treated outside Wales.”
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Posted by Karen Motley, Clinical Negligence Department, Chadwick Lawrence LLP (tonymay@chadlaw.co.uk ), medical negligence lawyers and clinical negligence solicitors in Huddersfield, Leeds, Wakefield and Halifax, West Yorkshire.
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