Judge’s despair over killer doctor, 85, who lied about his age to NHS
A JUDGE has described a hospital’s decision to rehire a doctor who lied about his age as ‘ astonishing and extremely troubling’ ahead of his sentencing for the manslaughter of a patient.
Dr Isyaka Mamman, 85, was once given a 12-month ban from medicine after providing a false date of birth to hide the fact he was over 65 and due to retire.
But he was rehired as a haematologist by the same hospital – and went on to kill a patient by piercing her heart with a needle. Managers had queried how he could have started medical school before his 11th birthday, to which Dr Mamman replied he had been ‘very brilliant’, a medical tribunal heard.
Despite two patients being injured in 2015 during his bone marrow biopsies – one suffered a heart attack as a result – in 2018 Dr Mamman, by then 81, attempted the same ‘routine procedure’ on mother-of-three Shahida Parveen.
The needle pierced the 48year- old’s pericardium – a fibrous sac enclosing the heart – causing massive internal bleeding. A nurse told Manchester Crown Court the patient’s husband, Khizar Mahmood, came running out shouting: ‘He killed her! I told him to stop three times but he did not listen.’ Mrs Parveen died less than three hours after going into hospital.
Mrs Justice Yip warned Dr Mamman he would be going to jail when she sentences him today after he admitted gross negligence manslaughter. And the judge said she was deeply concerned how Royal Oldham Hospital came to rehire him, saying Mrs Parveen ‘was failed by the trust and the doctor’.
Dr Mamman moved from Nigeria to study medicine in London in 1958, giving a date of birth in 1936. In 2001, when reaching the then compulsory NHS retirement age of 65, he claimed he was born in 1947.
In 2005 he was banned from practising for 12 months – only to win his job back two years later. And after the phasing out of the default retirement age in 2011, he continued working.
Last night Dr Chris Brookes, deputy chief executive for the Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust, which now runs Royal Oldham Hospital, offered its ‘sincerest condolences’ to Mrs Parveen’s family and said it had apologised to them. The trust has admitted liability in a civil claim the family brought. It stressed that Dr Mamman had not worked for the trust since the tragedy.
A spokesman said the concerns raised in 2015 were investigated but no restrictions were placed on his practice.
‘I told him to stop but he didn’t listen’