This criminal doctor and his botched back surgery has left me in agony

David Cohen
20.10.09

When a London surgeon promised Vivienne Edwards a cure for chronic back pain she couldn't know the danger she was putting herself in...

The day that Vivienne Edwards checked into the Whittington Hospital for an operation to relieve her severe backache was meant to be the start of “a glorious pain-free existence”. Chinh Nguyen, the consultant orthopaedic surgeon at the Whittington, had assured Vivienne, a former army nurse, that the operation to scrape away some bone to reduce the compression on her spinal cord was routine, she recalls.

Vivienne had every reason to feel confidence in Nguyen. Just months before, the Whittington's internal newsletter, The Link, had published his story in glowing terms. It described how Nguyen, then 40, had come to the UK as an 18-year-old refugee from Vietnam who “couldn't speak a word of English but dreamed of being a doctor like his father”. He graduated from University College London Medical School in 1993, and was employed in 2005 by the Whittington. The hospital attributed his “success” to “hard work” and “values passed on by his parents”.

But Nguyen had been leading a double life. Just four days after Vivienne's disastrously botched operation on 21 September 2006 — which not only failed to fix her back but also left her partially disabled — he would be arrested for money laundering and masterminding a £3.5 million network of cannabis farms across London.

As Vivienne struggled with the alleged after-effects of Nguyen's handiwork — including severe bowel and bladder malfunction, numb limbs, clawed feet and irreversible nerve damage causing unremitting pain — Nguyen was bailed. His wife, Tammy, 30, and his brother, Khin Quoc Nguyen, were also arrested and would also be charged.

Inexplicably, Nguyen was allowed to continue practising, both at the Whittington and a string of private hospitals across north London where his patients included star footballer Thierry Henry — work that earned him more than £150,000.

By the time Nguyen, now 43, stood trial and was jailed for five years at Wood Green Crown Court in March this year, he had left a trail of death and destruction. One of his patients, Satwant Vohra, 55, a healthy mother of two, died after he pierced her aorta in an operation at the private Garden Hospital in Hendon. He had failed to notice her bleeding and returned home after what should have been, like Vivienne's, a routine 45-minute operation to free a trapped nerve. It would later emerge at Vohra's inquest that four other patients had nearly died under the knife of Nguyen in 2006 and 2007.

Vivienne says she knew nothing about Nguyen's criminal record — or indeed the case of Mrs Vohra — when four months ago she decided to sue him and the Whittington Hospital NHS Trust for clinical negligence in a claim that could amount to £500,000. Speaking exclusively to the Evening Standard, she says that even after the hospital eventually fired the surgeon, the trust stonewalled her. “They never said why he had gone, only that he'd left the trust and that I'd be referred elsewhere for my ongoing care.”

But Vivienne's solicitor, Robert Dransfield, a partner at Stewarts Law, says that the claim by his client is “only one of a number of negligence claims that the hospital is facing over Mr Nguyen. The claims could potentially run into several million pounds and so the trust is desperate to keep it all as quiet as possible”.

Apart from the specific nature of these claims, cases like Vivienne's raise wider concerns as to how the hospital could possibly allow Dr Nguyen to continue to operate in the face of such serious criminal charges.

Approached this week by the Standard, a spokeswoman claimed the trust had been unaware of the charges. She said: “The Whittington did not know that Mr Nguyen had been arrested on 25 September 2006 until early this year. Late last year, Mr Nguyen requested leave to attend a court case about financial matters. The facts pertaining to the case were regarded by the hospital as private and confidential to him. Mr Nguyen was dismissed from the Whittington on 11 March 2009 and suspended by the General Medical Council on 9 March 2009.”  

But her statement contradicts evidence given at the June inquest into the death of Mrs Vohra. There Nguyen said he had informed David Sloman, the former chief executive of the Whittington Hospital NHS Trust (now chief executive of the Royal Free) of his arrest in January 2008, the month the police charged him. And Cecilia Clark, medical director of the Whittington, allegedly gave evidence that she knew about the charges but considered Nguyen to be competent. 

Asked to resolve this inconsistency, the hospital spokeswoman said: “I am unable to give you any more answers.”  

But Vivienne, a master scuba diver and self-employed lettings agent who lives with her partner in Finchley, is desperate for answers.  
She believes the problems with her back date back to her work as a nurse in the British Army in the late Sixties when she lifted patients without hoists. “I was given epidural injections but nothing helped. When Nguyen told me he could fix me once and for all, I was over the moon. I asked about potential side-effects but he said they were “not worth bothering about — too few to mention”. He was quite ebullient, saying Oh, we can do that!' when I asked if it would make me pain-free.”

The day after the operation Vivienne was discharged, despite complaining of back pain and other symptoms. Things got worse. “I couldn't pass urine, my bowels did not work, and I had to use a catheter to go to the toilet. But when I met Dr Nguyen for my post-operative check-up and told him what I was experiencing, he told me it had nothing to do with the operation.

“I was very tearful and told him he must have damaged a nerve. He calmly said it was pure coincidence', and continued to insist the operation had been a success.”

Today Vivienne cannot go out without a walking stick and is in constant pain, she says, despite wearing four painkilling patches on her arms. She has since had another operation — at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital in Stanmore — to lift her bladder, and faces yet another one on her feet.

Gritting her teeth against tears that soon become sobs, Vivienne says that she has been told her spinal cord injury is irreversible and that she will be need an anal catheter for life.

“I used to be an active, outgoing person, but now I can't walk for more than 10 minutes without having to stop in agony. I've become very solitary. My life revolves around hospitals. It's horrible. I'm only 60.”

Nguyen's insistence that Vivienne's operation was a success led her solicitors to question whether the botched procedure was properly recorded by the Whittington. When they asked for a copy of Nguyen's operating log book, the hospital wrote back: “The surgeons keep their own log books and unfortunately we now have no access to this.”

The idea that the Whittington has “no access” to the operating log books is alarming, particularly in light of the fact that during 2006 and 2007 Nguyen performed a number of operations that raised concern and caused the Whittington to suspend him temporarily in May 2007 from operating — though not from outpatient clinics — and send him for retraining. In March 2008, when he had completed his retraining, the Whittington allowed him to operate again, despite the police bringing formal charges against him in January 2008.

Tragically, neither the Whittington, nor any of the private hospitals he worked for, nor indeed the police, thought to inform the General Medical Council about the criminal charges faced by Nguyen. It was to have terrible consequences for Satwant Vohra and her family. When asked at the inquest how Mrs Vohra's fatal injury had occurred during an operation at the private Garden Hospital, Nguyen admitted: “Probably as a result of my surgery.” And when the Garden Hospital was asked why Nguyen was permitted to operate in the first place, a spokesman blamed the Whittington, saying the Garden had not been officially informed that he had previously been suspended there.

Today, with Nguyen behind bars, the Whittington faces embarrassment and the prospect of substantial payouts for negligence claims. But for Vivienne, no amount of money will compensate her for the devastation to her life.

“If I could turn the clock back, I would. I just wish I'd never met the man. And yet, when I think of Mrs Vohra, I consider myself lucky that I'm still alive. It is beyond belief that a surgeon who had probably already botched operations and been laundering money from cannabis farms could be allowed to continue operating on patients at NHS hospitals.”