When Theresa Mallett walked into Caird Hall in Dundee a little more than a fortnight ago, it was not her intention to bring Humza Yousaf’s keynote address to a standstill. Mallett, a committed nationalist, was attending the independence convention as an SNP member, but had hoped that she might tell her story to a party worker or journalist at the event. She claims she has been in “soul-destroying” pain for more than a decade since a botched sciatica operation performed by Sam Eljamel, a disgraced surgeon from Tayside. Mallett is one of 118 former patients calling for a public inquiry into what they believe is years of negligence, cover-ups and bad governance. When the first minister got up to speak, she decided to do the same. “I was listening to Humza and he came out with something like ‘every person in Scotland counts’,” said Mallett, 61, as though still incredulous at what she did next. “I felt enraged and I just started shouting at him. Eleven years of trauma and pain, getting no answers, gaslit by doctors – that all came out. “Where my voice came from, I don’t know. I’m usually easy-going. But I was glad I got it out.” For those listening in the hall, the effect was electrifying. Some audience members started booing the disruption, but stopped when they realised the source of Mallett’s fury. Yousaf called for calm, then walked off the stage into the crowd. What happened next is a bit of a blur, Mallett said. “The only thing I can remember clearly is him standing in front of me with his back to the cameras and saying, ‘a public inquiry is not off the table’.” It was December 2012 when Mallett “walked in the door of Ninewells hospital and left my life behind”. Although Eljamel, the then head of neurosurgery at NHS Tayside, assured her that the operation to remove a nerve had been a “complete success”, Mallett, who had led an active lifestyle including hill walking across Scotland, soon discovered that her pain was worse, not better. She spent the next 10 years increasingly isolated and disabled, searching for answers that were not forthcoming.
It was only last year that she read a local news story and found that more than a hundred others had reported similar stories. The list is harrowing: descriptions of paralysis, blindness, nerve damage, constant pain and severe incontinence. Jules Rose, a long-time campaigner, claims she had her tear gland removed instead of a brain tumour, while another woman said she felt like “a guinea pig” after she claims Eljamel used an experimental glue to seal her skull, which then burst, leaving her with spinal fluid leaking on to the floor. Alan Ogilvie, who helps coordinate the former patients’ group, said: “Sometimes, folk comment that our demos are small. But that’s because so many of Eljamel’s victims can’t leave the house.” NHS Tayside insisted that concerns were first raised about Eljamel’s conduct in June 2013, when he was put under supervision, although he had been working at the health board since 1995. But former colleagues told the BBC last month that bosses were warned about his malpractice in 2009. They suggested that he was allowed to continue because of the research funding he brought to his department and claimed that he often left junior doctors to carry out surgery unsupervised while he was doing private work elsewhere. The board said it was not aware of “any whistleblowing concerns or complaints by staff”, pointing out that it escalated the matter immediately once alerted, commissioning an external review by the Royal College of Surgeons, as a direct result of which he was suspended in December 2013. Eljamel gave up his right to practise in the UK in 2015 and is believed to be working in Libya. The whistleblowers’ evidence reinforces the view that the problem is systemic, said Ogilvie. “A public inquiry isn’t about Eljamel any more: it’s about who employed him. Why didn’t they check his credentials before employing him, now we find some are fake? It’s about who enabled him, it’s about the lack of clinical governance and failure of oversight organisations.” The board said Eljamel was appointed by an expert panel through a competitive recruitment process in line with national guidance of the time, and that its clinical and professional governance policies had been “continually strengthened”. But Ogilvie said the matter went beyond NHS Tayside: “This is not just a regional story – it reaches to upper levels of the medical establishment across the UK.” Last week, Yousaf kept his promise to talk to Mallett in detail by visiting her at her home in Glenrothes. She did not have enough seats for the first minister’s entourage, who had to requisition some garden deckchairs. A Scottish government spokesperson said the first minister had welcomed the opportunity to listen to her experience. “We are considering what the best next steps would be, including an independent commission, to ensure patients and their families can have confidence that they have the answers they need on their own cases and questions about Professor Eljamel’s practice,” they said. Mallett said she would reserve judgment until she could see real evidence of listening. “But there’s 117 others. Will he bother with them, too?”