Hospital to face substantial compensation claims

"When a London surgeon promised Vivienne Edwards a cure for chronic back pain she couldn't know the danger she was putting herself in...

The day that Vivienne Edwards checked into the Whittington Hospital for an operation to relieve her severe backache was meant to be the start of "a glorious pain-free existence". Chinh Nguyen, the consultant orthopaedic surgeon at the Whittington, had assured Vivienne, a former army nurse, that the operation to scrape away some bone to reduce the compression on her spinal cord was routine, she recalls...

But Nguyen had been leading a double life. Just four days after Vivienne's disastrously botched operation on 21 September 2006 -- which not only failed to fix her back but also left her partially disabled -- he would be arrested for money laundering and masterminding a £3.5 million network of cannabis farms across London...

Robert Dransfield, a partner at Stewarts Law, says that the claim by his client is "only one of a number of negligence claims that the hospital is facing over Mr Nguyen. The claims could potentially run into several million pounds and so the trust is desperate to keep it all as quiet as possible".

Please click the PDF below to read the full article published by The Evening Standard, 20 October 2009.