I have never held a full-time job since because I never felt well

I have never held a full-time job since because I never felt well enough I have spent most of the time going to see doctors. She begged to be referred to a different gynaecologist but her GP refused, saying that it was unethical.”When I left hospital I felt like a lump of jelly I couldn’t look after my six-year-old son He used to bring me milk and jam butties. When Mr Ledward turned up the next morning I had a very brutal operation in which he put in 76 stitches to try to stem the bleeding. THE DAY before her hysterectomy, Brenda Johnson sat on the hills outside Dover and cried. She was 36 and she had a six-year-old son but she had recently moved down from the north to live with her new partner, Roy, and she wanted more children. “I sobbed my eyes out that day because I didn’t believe the operation was necessary. When you are young you believe in doctors and you put your life in their hands Now I would argue the point with anyone I learnt a bitter lesson I wish I had listened to my inner self.”
That was in 1984.

Fourteen years later, Mrs Johnson still suffers pain and discomfort as a result of the surgery performed by Rodney Ledward. For two years she could not walk and she was on painkillers for ten.She had been told her condition was so urgent she should go private and the operation was carried out at St Saviour’s Hospital in Hythe, Kent.Afterwards she bled profusely, losing 28 pints of blood and fluid. The staff made frantic attempts to contact Mr Ledward without success.An anaesthetist warned that she needed multiple transfusions and as her condition deteriorated in the early hours the staff called Roy, Mrs Johnson’s partner, and told him to come to the hospital without delay.”I was fading fast. We need an external inquiry to discover who knew what when, who was responsible and how many other of these guys there are around.”. A spokesman said: “We are very concerned about these women and we are trying to meet their needs. There had been concerns expressed about Mr Ledward but there is a difference between allegations and evidence.

Establishing evidence of surgical incompetence is very difficult.”Jean Robinson, a former GMC member and a researcher at the Association for Improvements in Maternity Services, said: “This is much worse than the Bristol case [in which babies died from heart surgery] No one suggested the Bristol surgeons .. acted recklessly or operated when they didn’t need to. What is unexplained is why a surgeon whose errors were so gross that patients almost bled to death and whose colleagues were left to patch up his mistakes, was allowed to continue in practice for so long.The hospital maintains that it acted as soon as it had sufficient evidence. The GMC found that in three of the ten cases, the treatment he gave was “inappropriate” or had “no scientific basis.”After Mr Ledward was suspended in January 1996, an internal inquiry at the William Harvey examined 150 of his operations and found that one-third had ended with serious complications of which 12 showed evidence of incompetence. During the GMC hearing, two former colleagues testified that he had gone against “basic medical procedures” in operating on one patient.

He is now barred from practising in the NHS and in private sector.In the six weeks since the ending of the case, 179 women have contacted the hospital in the belief that they, too, may have been victims of Mr Ledward. A public meeting held on 29 October was packed with 65 people when a dozen had been expected. Women who had suffered in silence for years stood up in front of strangers and described intimate symptoms which had left them debilitated and in some cases had destroyed their lives.June Halkins, chief executive of the South-east Kent Community Health Council, who attended the meeting organised by a patient support group, said: “The stories were very moving. I was amazed how many were prepared in a quiet and dignified way to talk of their experiences.”Mr Ledward was appointed consultant gynaecologist at the William Harvey hospital in 1980 but he also operated at St Saviour’s private hospital in Hythe run by the insurer Bupa and at other private hospitals. What is only now becoming clear is the scale of the damage he caused.The charges in the GMC hearing related to 14 cases over a period of seven years from 1989 to January 1996 when Mr Ledward was suspended from his National Health Service post at the William Harvey Hospital in Ashford, Kent.