IN MY VIEW

PEOPLE suffering the complications of surgery can be left with horrific scarring as well as physical and emotional issues.

However, if the problems are not deemed to be significantly affecting their physical health then often the NHS cannot help them.

This may lead them to consider seeking compensation in order to pay for private surgery to correct any issues. However, if the doctor that operated on them was from a foreign country and returns to that country it can be very difficult to do so.

If the doctor is resident in a foreign country then he or she may not have insurance.

If patients try to seek compensation through a UK clinic’s insurers they may find that liability rests with the surgeon’s own insurers rather than the clinic.

And to make matters worse, if a surgeon doesn’t make their own insurers aware of a complaint then it could invalidate any claim against the policy.

Even getting relevant records can be difficult.

Patients may have to take court action to get the operation records, with assistance from solicitors, before considering litigation against the surgeon.

Doctors in these cases can often be non-responsive to correspondence sent to them.

And there can be issues trying to track them down if they are abroad. Doctors have no obligation to tell patients when they are relocating to another country or where they are going.

If a patient does manage to track his or her surgeon down in a foreign country then any legal papers have to be translated into the language of the country where they are being served – adding additional legal costs and increasing the length of time the court process takes.

The number of cases we are seeing that relate to these sorts of issues has definitely risen in recent years.

Sadly that means there are a growing number of people running into these issues leaving them facing further medical bills or dealing with surgery issues.