Swedish doctors criticized after botched UK ops

A new report has shown that as many as one in three of the patients treated by the so-called “flying doctors” from Scandinavia suffered poor outcomes with one in five needing repeat operations.

Lawyers have been brought in to consider if action can be brought in six cases treated at a clinic in western England by Swedish, Danish and Finnish doctors brought in to ease the high demand for orthopaedic procedures.

The Somerset treatment centre hired surgeons from Scandinavia who flew in to perform the operations with little prior contact with the patients.

“They didn’t see their patients postoperatively. They flew in to do the operations, and the doctors in South Wales were left to pick up the pieces,” Stephen Cannon, former president of the British Orthopaedic Association said to the newspaper.

An audit, published in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, of more than 200 patients who underwent knee surgery between 2004 and 2006 has revealed that the number of below par operations was ten times the national UK average.

The newspaper reports that the news of the faulty treatments come amid concerns over EU laws, passed in 2004, which allow doctors in EU member states to work across the union without any checks on language skills or competence.