Patients Before Profits: Justice for Victims of Ian Paterson

In April 2017, former breast surgeon Ian Paterson was criminally convicted of multiple counts of wounding with intent at Nottingham Crown Court and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Paterson had been carrying out unnecessary surgical procedures and operations on patients referred to him by private healthcare provider Spire. These included invasive lumpectomies when biopsies would suffice, mastectomies on women who did not have breast cancer and cleavage sparing mastectomies, a procedure not recognised in clinical practice.

A £37 million compensation package was approved by a High Court judge for the hundreds of private patients affected by his actions. This included £27.2 million paid out by Spire Healthcare and £10 million paid by Paterson's insurers and former employers at the Heart of the England NHS Trust.

In 2019, our clinical negligence lawyers, who acted for 650 former patients of Paterson, settled what was thought to be the last of the civil compensation claims for clients against the hospitals involved. 

Thousands of further patients recalled

The Independent Inquiry into Ian Paterson published in February 2020 found that the initial recall process didn’t reach out to all of Paterson’s potential victims.

In December 2020, thousands of additional recall letters were sent to patients treated at Spire Parkway and Spire Little Aston.

In February 2023, Spire announced that upon reviewing historic legacy IT systems, a further 1,500 patients from more than 20 years ago were identified as having possibly received negligent treatment from Paterson. 

Timeline of the Paterson case

Patients Before Profits campaign

We are focused on stopping rogue surgeons like Paterson from harming patients again.

During the investigations into Paterson’s negligence on behalf of our clients, we exposed a number of issues surrounding private healthcare providers, and identified a number of ways in which they are trying to avoid taking responsibility for any problems that emerge from the treatment.

It seems fundamental to us that patient safety should be paramount, whether someone is being treated in a private setting or on the NHS. Our campaign, Patients Before Profits - Justice for Victims of Ian Paterson, will work to ensure that wherever people are treated, the same legal protections and safety standards apply, and procedures will be followed.

What do we want to achieve?

The Patients Before Profits - Justice for Victims of Ian Paterson campaign aims to:

• Expose and eliminate the ‘liability loophole’ in the justice system that exists for private healthcare providers. This has, for too long, allowed them to avoid responsibility for negligent staff working on their premises and keep all of the payments they have received for the treatment regardless of its outcome.
• Ensure that private healthcare companies are held to the same standards and obligations of transparency, safety and accountability as the NHS.
• Guarantee that patients are, at all times, put before profit: no healthcare provider should be able to get away with having a patient poorly treated “on their watch” and still be able to profit from that.
• Secure a legal guarantee that all patients, wherever they are treated, will have the same remedies and opportunity for legal redress should they be injured by anyone else at the treatment centre.