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NHS Audiology Scandal – Dr Camilla Kingdon Review: Final Report Published
Laura Vincent Evans
Kingsley Napley's specialist clinical negligence team successfully achieved a settlement for a woman with two young children who suffered a delayed diagnosis of breast cancer.
Our client was referred to a Breast Clinic at an NHS hospital having presented to her GP with a lump in her right breast. She had a family history of breast cancer. On attending the clinic she underwent a mammogram and ultrasound scan, followed by a fine needle aspiration (FNA). The FNA results indicated a benign fibroadenoma, and despite recommendations for a core biopsy our client was reassured and discharged without undergoing further investigation. Over a year later, our client noticed changes to her breast and was fast-tracked back to the Breast Clinic. This time, a core biopsy was performed, revealing invasive lobular carcinoma. By this stage, the cancer had spread extensively, with 13 out of 15 lymph nodes involved.
The delay in diagnosis had catastrophic consequences for our client’s health and quality of life. She underwent a left and right mastectomy, chemotherapy and radiotherapy and required ongoing hormone treatments. The treatment caused chemically-induced menopause, weakened bones, chronic exhaustion, joint pain, and a compromised immune system. Most significantly, the expert evidence obtained by our team found that that our client’s life expectancy had been reduced by around 5 years.
Following our client's instruction in 2021, our team embarked on a comprehensive investigation. The Defendant NHS hospital Trust made some admissions following a pre-action Letter of Claim but argued that the treatment would have been the same with earlier diagnosis and the impact on our client’s life expectancy was not as significant as suggested by our experts.
Our client was unable to continue with her successful career in marketing as she would otherwise have done and we undertook detailed investigations in order to advance a claim for lost earnings and loss of promotion.
The Defendant in this claim made several early offers of settle which we advised our client to reject, and we went onto settle the claim for a significantly larger figure. Our team was tenacious in their approach to this case and obtained a seven-figure settlement for our client.