NHS Trust to Re-examine 4,500 More Breast Cancer Cases Back to 2015
County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust is extending its review of breast cancer care by a decade, adding up to 4,500 cases in work expected to take five years. Of 538 cases examined so far, 321 patients were found to have been harmed, including one death, and around 640 people have called the trust’s helpline. The board chair Alison Marshall offered “a sincere apology to all the women and their families who have been affected by the failings in our breast services”.
A harm rate of 321 in 538 is the figure that should stop a reader, because it suggests the original sample was not an unlucky tail but a representative slice — which is precisely why the lookback has been pushed back to 2015. The five-year timetable is its own problem: women who may have been harmed a decade ago will wait years to learn whether they were, and the solicitor acting for some of them, Chloe Gibson, reached for the obvious phrase, “justice delayed is justice denied”. Reviews on this scale have a pattern — each widening of the window finds more, and the trust has already widened it once. The national question is whether the failure was local or systemic. Watch for the Care Quality Commission’s position and whether other trusts are asked to check.