Families want deaths of loved ones after heart surgery investigated

CLAIMS OF A 'LACK OF TRANSPARENCY' FROM NHS TRUST

- By DEBORAH HALL

SEVEN families have instructed solicitors to investigate the care provided to loved ones who died after undergoing heart valve operations at Castle Hill Hospital.

Hudgell Solicitors say all families "tell a similar story of risks and outcomes of surgery not being fully explained" and "a lack of transparency" from Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. All patients died after undergoing Transcatheter Aortic Valve Implantation (TAVI) procedures, a minimally invasive heart procedure used to treat narrowed heart valves, at Castle Hill.

Among those being represented are the family of Barbara Fields, 76, who had a TAVI procedure and suffered a stroke, ten minutes after waking from the operation. She died three days later.

Despite concerns first being raised by a clinical director at the Trust five years ago, families say they only learned of the investigations into "poor" TAVI procedures at the hospital through recent media reports, and after a police investigation was launched. The legal firm has revealed the cases it is investigating date back to 2019, the year that TAVI procedures were introduced at the hospital, to August last year, on patients aged 75 to 87.

The death of a patient in August 2024 was five months after the Trust had been presented with the findings of a 2023 Royal College of Physicians (RCP) review into 11 deaths following TAVI procedures, identifying poor levels of care in six cases, one of which was described as "very poor".

The RCP also said there had been a "lack of experience" in the first few years of the department's operation, after launch in 2019, a time when the death rate was three times the national average, with "issues raised over the process for contacting the coroner's office".

'Time for full transparency and proper accountability'