AN NHS consultant has been paid hundreds of thousands of pounds in compensation after colleagues discharged her from hospital dangerously early and then failed to react properly to her life-threatening symptoms.
Dr Caroline Clark, 54, was so traumatised by her experience, in which she was effectively forced to save her own life, that she has since left the profession on medical grounds.
In an out-of-court settlement the hospital trust responsible has admitted liability and agreed to pay her a six-figure sum in compensation for the post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) she developed as a result of her treatment.
Dr Clark, an experienced consultant radiologist, said: “I’m a trained clinician with a wealth of experience. I was able to diagnose myself and realise I needed urgent treatment. It was my response to my own condition which saved my life.”
Her experience began in September 2008, when a colleague spotted that she had a lump on her thyroid, a gland found in the neck that controls how quickly the body uses energy and regulates its calcium levels.
Traumatised: Dr Caroline Clark
After undergoing a threehour operation to remove a malignant growth at Peterborough City Hospital, Cambridgeshire, she was placed on a general, rather than specialist, ward.
She said: “I got no postoperative care and no pain relief because the nurses were so busy looking after all the elderly patients on the ward. I had to take myself to the lavatory with my drip because there was no one to help me.”
The next morning Dr Clark awoke suspecting she was showing symptoms of hypocalcaemia – dangerously low calcium levels in the blood.
A junior doctor she had trained confirmed this, but two other doctors disagreed with the diagnosis and she was later discharged.
DrClarkclaims Peterborough Hospital, run by Peterborough and Stamford Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (PSFT), discharged her early because it needed her bed in order to avoid missing its admission targets which can result in a financial penalty.
She said: “The reason for keeping patients in hospital is to monitor for these complications. Every basic health care employee knows there are two predictable life threatening complications after a total thyroidectomy: bleeding and hypocalcaemia. But as far as my post-op care goes, I might as well have had the surgery on my kitchen table.”
The morning after her discharge, Dr Clark awoke with her hands tightly clenched. She immediately realised she was suffering a carpopedal spasm as a result of becoming hypocalcaemic, a potentially fatal condition in which calcium drains from the body.
“I knew immediately I was in big trouble. I realised I only had minutes before I started dying so I rang 999,” said Dr Clark.
Despite explaining carefully to both the operator and a nurse on the phone that she would need urgent calcium injections or risk death, the response on the other end of the line seemed to her to be lacking any urgency.
Dr Clark went downstairs to wait for the ambulance, opening her front door in case she collapsed before the paramedics arrived.
“I sat there watching the sun come up over the valley and I knew time wasn’t on my side,” she said. “Every minute I was waiting for those flashing blue lights to appear I could feel my life ebbing away. I thought, in fact I knew, I was going to die.”
After 20 minutes the ambulance arrived and took Dr Clark to Kettering Hospital, Northamptonshire, where she was given painful calcium injections to prevent her going into cardiac arrest.
Dr Clark had to ask doctors herself to replenish her calcium levels, and it was only the intervention of a consultant physician – at the request of Dr Clark’s own secretary – that resulted in her being given a calcium drip to maintain the required levels.
On being discharged four days later, she rang the medical director of Peterborough Hospital and urged him to ban the discharge of thyroidectomy patients until at least 48 hours after their operation – a measure he is understood to have since introduced.
Dr Clark’s experience left her suffering from PTSD, which resulted in her having terrifying flashbacks of her ordeal, particularly when in a hospital environment.
The 54-year-old has been forced to take early retirement on medical grounds, cutting her medical career short by 10 years.
Dr Clark said her experience has left her thoroughly disillusioned with the NHS.
“Nobody seems to really care,” she said. “The general attitude seems to be ‘get them in’, ‘get them out’ and hit the targets. It’s a whole culture that has become institutionalised and needs to be changed.”