Medical negligence is a vast and complex subject. What’s more, a claim for compensation must be settled or legal proceedings must have been issued within three years of the event causing the injury. Legal action will become statute barred if this time limit is exceeded; however, there are some exceptions to this rule.
One of the most frequent types of compensation claim seen by medical negligence solicitors in the UK is the failure to diagnose cancer. Significant advances in medical knowledge have made it possible to prevent or treat some types of this illness through early detection, which can dramatically improve quality of life, survival chances and life expectancy.
Breast cancer More than one in 10 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer and early detection, through self examination and mammograms, is a key factor in successful treatment and higher survival rates.
Cancer of the breast often responds well to early treatment; however sometimes, even after a woman feels a lump, her cancer goes undetected for months – often due to medical negligence, which results in more legal claims for cancer of the breast than any other disease.
Two workers were dismantling a steel chimney at a manufacturing plant. The chimney caught fire and there was doubt about whether the fatalities were caused by the fire or the subsequent fall from height.
It transpired that the chimney was coated internally with a bituminous residue. The HSE maintained that the bitumen caught fire and the flames spread to the rest of the chimney. However, we had doubts that the flame from the burner would start a fire and that the fire would be self-sustaining in that way.
Tests were carried out on a sheet of metal of the same thickness to determine the area that would be heated by the flame, the metal temperature and the time for the heat to decay.
You may well ask what a retired oral and maxillofacial surgeon with academic interests is doing writing an editorial for Your Witness. It is perhaps to explain what oral and maxillofacial surgery is and what an oral and maxillofacial surgeon does. It may also be helpful to identify some of the troublesome areas and to indicate how some of the problems may be avoided.
The principal aspects of the speciality to be considered are orofacial/ maxillofacial trauma, which includes craniofacial injuries as well as dentoalveolar (dental and jaw) trauma. Craniofacial deformities, both congenital and acquired, are relatively common, as are orthognathic (jaw deformity) surgery and cleft lip and palate correction and post-traumatic deformities. Head and neck surgery is very much a specialised area concerned with the management of tumours, vascular lesions and especially oral cancer – the latter often associated with smoking and excess alcohol consumption.
To most people plastic surgery equates with cosmetic surgery; yet its origins could not be further removed, for it grew out of necessity in the treatment of war injuries.
The traumatic injuries that war causes presented the surgeons of the First World War with cases the like of which they had never seen. Massive facial injuries with underlying facial bone and mandibular fractures stimulated ear, nose and throat surgeons to deal with areas that fell between the specialties as they then existed. Those defects required soft tissue cover and bone reconstruction in a complex series of operations.
With the development of microsurgery a new phase was entered, allowing the immediate transfer of large areas of skin to cover important defects – as in lower limb injuries – the replantation of amputated digits and hands, the transfer of toes to reconstruct amputated digits – especially the thumb – and the reconstruction of congenital hand defects using microsurgical techniques.
