Damages for family of man who died in hospital
02 Jul 2009
The family of a man who died in hospital after a routine operation
is to receive compensation for the loss.
Gary Rayner, 46, was admitted to Sunderland Royal Hospital on June
26th 2007 in order to have surgery on his lymph glands after
successfully recovering from cancer, the Sunderland Echo
reports.
However, he began suffering problems on June 30th and called a
nurse after becoming dizzy and hot.
Mr Rayner went into cardiac arrest and although a crash team was
called to resuscitate him, they were unable to do so. He was
pronounced dead at 23:00 BST.
A subsequent inquest into the death revealed that Mr Rayner should
have been given the anti-clotting drug Heparin shortly after his
surgery, but Les Boobis, medical director and consultant surgeon of
City Hospitals Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust, revealed that he
was not administered this until June 28th.
It was ruled that the patient may have survived if he had been
given the medication and the trust agreed to pay Mr Rayner's family
an undisclosed sum in compensation.
Negligence may occur from delay or failure to diagnose a condition,
delay or failure to treat a condition, when a treatment goes wrong,
use of the wrong treatment, or failure to obtain consent.
Anyone who has suffered as a result of clinical negligence should
seek the advice of a solicitor specialising in such claims.
Nina Ali, a solicitor in the clinical negligence team at Hodge
Jones & Allen LLP commented: "It is extremely worrying that
mistakes of this kind seem to be an increasing occurrence and
suggests that issues such as adequate training and staffing levels
are still not being properly looked at.
"The clinical negligence team at Hodge Jones & Allen deals with
a significant number of fatal cases and we have a great deal of
expertise in dealing with this type of case."
