‘I almost had my leg amputated because of medical malpractice'

Telegraph

10 hours ago

When Grace Ofori-Attah was a teenager, she was a keen netball player with a big group of friends. She was involved in student film, and she loved to write, having her first novel picked up by an agent when she was just 20. Then, as she was studying for her final exams at the University of Cambridge, she became 'increasingly out of breath', with pain in her legs and across her hips so severe it prevented her from sleeping at night.
As a medical student, she respected the judgement of the GP she consulted, who wrote her symptoms off as stress, anxiety, asthma, sciatica, and then just 'that I wasn't healthy'. But 'you know when your body is dying,' she says, 20 years on. 'I was very, very ill, but these doctors were telling me that there was nothing wrong.'
Eventually Ofori-Attah was left unable to walk, and was given a wheelchair by her college. The day before her medical exams began, 'my next door neighbour, who was this wonderful mathematician who I'd never spoken to, carried me with another student to the GP'. This time she was seen by a different doctor. 'He said, 'You have to go straight to the hospital. You can't sit your exams.'' It was deep vein thrombosis (DVT). There were clots all over her body, a 'huge one' near her heart. 'As someone who's a real geek, I just started crying. He said, 'If you don't go to the hospital now, you probably won't live to the end of the week.''
Today, Ofori-Attah know s that what happened to her as a student was medical malpractice. Her college doctor's negligence could have cost her a limb, or even her life. For a time, doctors at the hospital she was treated in 'thought I had lung cancer, because the clots were so extensive,' she says. 'They were also unsure whether or not they were going to have to amputate the leg.' Her parents had cause to sue, but the family took no action, and accepted the practice's apology. 'They're both very Christian. Eventually they just said to me, 'Look, you're going to be a doctor, and you're going to make mistakes too.''
Ofori-Attah recovered, without losing her leg, and she did go on to qualify as a doctor. She moved to the University of Oxford to finish her medical degree and eventually became a consultant psychiatrist, specialising in addiction. Experiencing malpractice herself, 'really did inform how I felt about medicine going forward, and how I saw the medical education I'd had,' she says. She decided to leave the profession five years ago. There was no dramatic exit. She became a doctor for the same reason that she is now a full-time screenwriter: that she was 'always interested in people, and why they do the things they do,' she says.
Her most successful drama, ITV's Malpractice, is directly inspired by what she saw over the course of her medical career. At the start of the hit series, a man walks into the reception of West Yorkshire Royal Hospital with a gun. Angry and covered in blood, he demands that main character, Dr Lucinda Edwards, immediately treats a man who lies motionless on the floor next to him, with a bullet hole in his chest. It sounds far-fetched, but when Ofori-Attah was in Dr Edwards' shoes as a junior doctor working in A&E, 'there were two bodies, not one', she says. She declines to go into specifics, out of doctorly respect for her former patients' privacy, 'but whatever you see in Malpractice, the truth is probably worse.'
The crisis leads to the death of a young woman under Dr Edwards' care who has had a drug overdose, leading the doctor to be investigated for malpractice, despite her impossible position. Ofori-Attah's parents were right: under the pressure of acute disasters, or just the day-to-day churn of patients who desperately need help, real-life doctors do make mistakes. It has only become more frequent since their daughter left university. Between 2023 and 2024, the NHS received 13,784 new clinical negligence claims and reports of incidents, compared with the 11,945 cases reported in the year up to 2014. Serious mistakes are common. Research suggests that one in twenty hospital deaths are avoidable, and are therefore a result of malpractice.
Doctors have called for the General Medical Council (GMC), which investigates complaints about practitioners, to be scrapped. The British Medical Association (BMA) – the union that represents two-thirds of doctors in Britain – has pushed for the overhaul as it believes that the GMC is 'failing to protect patients'. At the same time, victims of malpractice often want to see doctors be held responsible publicly. The families of three people murdered in Nottingham in June 2023, have asked that the doctors who approved the release of killer Valdo Calocane from a psychiatric ward be named in the press, to provide accountability for 'poor leadership and bad decision-making'.
Ofori-Attah believes that doctors should not be named 'until proven guilty'. The GMC will never be scrapped, she believes, but 'the way that they investigate doctors seriously needs to be looked at'. The process 'goes on for months', she says. 'It's not uncommon for doctors to commit suicide before the end of an investigation. Often when that happens, they're found not to have committed malpractice in the first place. It is so, so stressful.' Then there is the ordeal of the coroners' courts, which most doctors must face at some point. Here, grieving family members can cross-examine doctors who give evidence. So extreme is the situation that 'people assumed I must have made it up when it happened to Dr Edwards in Malpractice,' Ofori-Attah says.
She would know. While working in a psychiatric hospital, Ofori-Attah herself was criticised by the grieving family of a patient who had taken their own life following a stay in the hospital where she worked. 'It was one of those situations where the whole team had been in agreement that this patient could leave the hospital. It was my job to approve a more junior doctor's assessment,' she says. After the patient was discharged, they were admitted to a private hospital, which they later left, before they died. Their parents wrote a letter to the hospital, which 'singled out my name in the notes due to its origin,' she says. 'They queried my competence and ability to speak English, and my qualifications, having never met me, and assumed that these factors must have contributed to their relative's suicide.
'It was unusual, and hurtful, that the parents took objection to me specifically. They wrote to the trust about this 'foreign doctor', who presumably didn't have good qualifications, and they wanted to know where I'd studied. I had to go to the coroner's court to give evidence on the stand, knowing that this family was going to be there with all these presumptions about my lack of ability.'
Once her patient's parents heard her speak in the stand, however, they came to her and apologised. 'Because they had now heard me speak, they knew that I was not what they had imagined, and they understood that I had done my best for their child. I was so shocked, because I was only expecting anger from them.' In the end, no claim of medical negligence was ever pursued.
Her ITV drama showed viewers what she knows about malpractice: that doctors inevitably make mistakes under pressure, no matter how well-trained and experienced they may be. But she also wanted lay people to know that 'anyone can be accused of anything', including a doctor whose Old Bailey trial she sat as a juror for, before she quit the profession. 'I was sitting there listening to the evidence, and I knew that there was no physiological way that what that doctor was accused of could have happened.' The doctor had already been named in the press. 'It's so unfair that this can happen, until there's evidence to support it.'
How the public sees doctors has shifted dramatically in the last few years, Ofori-Attah says. Once, she and her colleagues were put on a pedestal. Now – thanks to a combination of an increase in real failures caused by pressure on the NHS, and pay strikes by junior doctors – 'we don't have the same support any more'. It's part of why many of her Oxbridge-educated colleagues have left the profession, or have moved abroad to continue practicing. 'You're there for patients, and if patients don't trust you, then it's very difficult to do your job.'
As a writer, Ofori-Attah now finds that she can speak to patients in a way that she never could as a doctor. At the end of one exhausting day early in her career, 'I went to see a short film about depression that some of my sisters' friends had made,' she recalls. 'I'd been in the hospital all day, trying to get patients to follow treatment plans, and it's a function of being a doctor that they're not often that interested in what you have to say.' Seeing how her sister and her friends could reach people through their work 'was life-changing'. She then turned her hand to writing dialogue, having never been able to finish her novel. The script she wrote in two weeks, in a 'kind of creative manic flurry', became Malpractice.
Despite all of her own trials as a doctor, and as a patient, Ofori-Attah can see herself going back to medicine one day. 'Leaving in the pandemic made it easier, because everything was so awful, but I really miss speaking to so many people from different walks of life, being there with them in some of their hardest or most important moments,' she says. 'There's no way of quantifying what that feels like. It's a real privilege.'