Surgeon damaged dozens of patients by misplacing screws in their backs

Every day Sharon Smith has to take a strong morphine tablet to dull the excruciating pain she has lived with for more than a decade. 

“I am in chronic pain every day. It’s affected our whole family and I’ve lost all my independence,” said Smith, from Leigh, Greater Manchester.

Over four years from 2009, she endured three operations on her spine at Salford Royal Hospital, which as an NHS trust was once fêted as England’s safest.

But the hospital had a dark secret: an incompetent leading surgeon who, an independent review would later find, had already “contributed” to the death of a girl in 2007.

Now a wider investigation has confirmed that dozens of other patients who went under John Bradley Williamson’s knife were harmed or received poor care.

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Source: The Times, 30 July 2023