Failings led to death of woman after weight loss surgery, coroner says
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Susan Evans was not seen by specialist at Queen Alexandra hospital, Portsmouth, during junior doctors’ strike and contracted sepsis. Failings at a hospital contributed to the death of a 55-year-old woman who suffered abdominal sepsis after weight loss surgery at the time of a junior doctors’ strike, a coroner has said.
Susan Evans returned to Queen Alexandra hospital in Portsmouth, Hampshire, with stomach pains two days after undergoing elective gastric bypass surgery. She was sent back home without being seen by a member of the specialist bariatric team or a senior doctor, though hospital policy says this should happen, and became seriously unwell.
Evans returned to hospital and underwent two further operations but died a month after the original procedure. In a prevention of future deaths report coroner Sally Olsen said neither written nor informal policies had been followed and failures “contributed more than minimally” to Evans’ death.
The coroner said that on 11 July 2023, Susan Evans underwent gastric bypass surgery. The surgery went to plan and appropriate measures were taken to avoid the possibility of an anastomotic leak, a rare but recognised complication. Initially, Evans recovered well, but she experienced abdominal pain in the early hours of 13 July 2023, which was likely due to an anastomotic leak.
The coroner highlighted that it was the first day of a resident doctors’ strike – formerly called junior doctors. She said: “Unrelated to this, the hospital only had the equivalent of one full-time specialist bariatric nurse, who was not on duty.
