Victims of failed surgery demand recall of all patients

Michelle Nolan takes morphine daily for the pain she has lived with for 14 years after botched surgery at the hands of a once renowned surgeon.

She suffered irreversible nerve damage in July 2010 when John Bradley Williamson, a former president of the British Scoliosis Society, inserted a screw that was too long into her spine at Spire Manchester Hospital.

The 49-year-old from Chadderton, near Oldham, needs crutches and lost her job as a legal secretary and later her house and marriage. “I lost everything because of him,” she said. “I thought I was the only one he had harmed.”

She was not. Families and patients operated on by Williamson over two decades at the Salford Royal Hospital, Spire Manchester Hospital and the Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital, have formed a support group and want a full recall of all of his patients.

They fear some could be suffering without realising they are victims of poor care.

Williamson told the coroner investigating Catherine’s death that her surgery “progressed uneventfully” and “the blood loss was perhaps a little higher than one would usually anticipate but was certainly not extreme”.

Yet days after her death, Williamson sent an internal letter to the hospital’s haematology department head Simon Jowitt describing the surgery as “difficult” and involving “a catastrophic haemorrhage”.

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Source: The Times, 18 February 2024