'I will find peace knowing my husband's death was avoidable. He should be here today - but we can't go back... we have to go forwards'
Dr Shivani Tanna has been working in the NHS for 18 years. "Everything [she] always had concerns about played out" in the care of her husband, who died after NHS hospital failures. A passionate doctor from a circle of acclaimed medics, Dr Tanna was thrust into life ‘on the other side’ as a ‘patient and a relative’ when her husband, Professor Amit Patel, was struck by a life-threatening illness.
That experience, the devastated mum-of-two claims, "corroborates what [her] own patients have told [her] about the fact that, currently, the NHS is not fit for purpose".
In the wake of her husband's death, Dr Tanna says his case reveals fundamental issues in the health service. “We have been indoctrinated as doctors, service users, and as a society in general to believe that this is a wonderful entity and we are so lucky to have a national health service," she says.
“However, nobody wants to address the elephant in the room - that it is operating on less than full staff constantly... there is so much poor practice that it’s become normalised."
Three years on and a long-running inquest to find answers later, Prof Patel’s wife is fighting to make changes to the NHS.
“It has not been fit for purpose for decades,” Dr Tanna told the Manchester Evening News.
"It is operating on less than full staff constantly, relying on bank staff and locums, and we’ve got doctors leaving in droves because they’ve not been nurtured or given the opportunity to work, I think, in a safe and appropriate environment.”
The Area Coroner for the Manchester City concluded that the death of a 43-year old Consultant Haematologist and father of two, Prof Amit Patel, would have been avoided were it not for ‘inexplicable’ failures by clinicians to provide a national-level Multi-Disciplinary Team (MDT) with relevant and readily available information about the patient.
Prof Patel was suffering from Hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (‘HLH’), a rare disorder in which he himself was an expert. The Coroner found that the local clinicians at Wythenshawe Hospital had failed to provide a National HLH MDT with relevant and readily available information that would have influenced the decision making about Prof Patel’s care. As a result the National MDT, operating on incomplete information, recommended that Prof Patel undergo an Endobronchial Ultrasound guided biopsy (EBUS) procedure, a complication of which ultimately led to his death.
The Coroner also found that there were failures in the process by which Prof Patel’s consent was obtained to undergo the procedure and as a result he was not given the opportunity to provide his informed consent to the EBUS that ultimately led to his death.
Source: Manchester Evening News, 17 June 2024