UK legal first as court fines health trust over patient death ‘secrecy’

A HOSPITAL trust yesterday became the first in Britain to be prosecuted and fined for failing to be ‘transparent’ about a death.

University Hospitals Plymouth Trust did not act ‘with candour or openness’ towards an elderly patient’s family. Elsie Woodfield, 91, died at Plymouth’s Derriford Hospital after going in for an endoscopy. The Care Quality Commission said the trust failed to tell her family that the death may have been caused by a mistake during the operation.

Her daughter Anna Davidson received a letter apologising some time later, but she felt it lacked ‘remorse’, Plymouth Magistrates’ Court heard. Yesterday the trust gave a new apology after admitting it breached its duty of candour under the Health and Social Care Act. The duty was imposed in 2015 after hundreds of patients were abused and neglected in the Mid Staffordshire Hospital scandal.

The CQC has issued fines and warnings for similar breaches in the past but this was the first time it had taken a trust to court. The court was told that Mrs Woodfield’s endoscopy was abandoned after five minutes when she suffered a perforated oesophagus. She later collapsed and died on a hospital ward.

Her family were never told exactly what had happened as an internal incident report deemed it not to be a serious incident.

When her daughter complained,

‘Impossible to grieve’

a statement from the trust ‘failed to provide an account of all the facts’. The court heard she has found it ‘ impossible to grieve’ with so many unanswered questions.

The trust accepted that it failed to communicate with the patient’s family openly and transparently.

District Judge Joanna Matson said she was bound by maximum penalty guidelines that were not enough to cover the distress caused by the breach and ordered the trust to pay all the legal costs in the case – £10,845 on top of a £1,600 fine and £120 victim surcharge.