Hospital failings led to woman’s death after weight loss surgery, coroner says

Failings at a hospital contributed to the death of a 55-year-old woman who suffered abdominal sepsis after weight loss surgery at the time of a junior doctors’ strike, a coroner has said.

Susan Evans returned to Queen Alexandra hospital in Portsmouth, Hampshire, with stomach pains two days after undergoing elective gastric bypass surgery.

She was sent home without being seen by a member of the specialist bariatric team or a senior doctor, though hospital policy says this should happen, and became seriously unwell.

Evans returned to hospital and underwent two further operations but died a month after the original procedure.

In a prevention of future deaths report, the coroner Sally Olsen said neither written nor informal policies had been followed and failures “contributed more than minimally” to Evans’s death.

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Source: The Guardian, 1 January 2025