NHS MANAGERS HID 100,000 PATIENT SCANS IN CAR BOOTS One hundred thousand patients. One hundred thousand people went to hospital, trusted the NHS with their bodies, had X-rays and scans taken, and were never told what those scans showed. Some of those images showed cancer. Some showed serious illness that needed urgent treatment. The films sat in corridors and store rooms, rotting and unchecked, for years. Nobody looked at them. Nobody picked up the phone. Nobody told a single patient. This happened. At the Royal London Hospital. In the heart of London. In the 21st century. When health inspectors were due to arrive and see the chaos for themselves, managers locked the backlog in a storeroom so it would stay hidden. Consultants physically stuffed patient X-ray films into their car boots to keep them out of sight during official visits. The inspection came and went. The tick boxes were filled in. The patients stayed in the dark. Dr Otto Chan was a consultant radiologist at the hospital. A decorated, respected, senior doctor with 23 years of service. He found this scandal and he refused to stay quiet. He reported the hidden scans. He flagged that junior doctors were being pushed to perform procedures they had never been trained for, unsupervised, on real patients. He went to the British Medical Association. He went to the medical press. He did every single thing the system tells you to do. Barts and The London NHS Trust @NHSBartsHealth responded by sacking him for gross misconduct in June 2006. At the employment tribunal, the Trust did not apologise. They did not express concern for the 100,000 patients left in the dark. They told the judge that Dr Chan was not a whistleblower at all. He was a troublemaker running a campaign to damage the organisation. His concerns were pure fantasy. That was the official position of an NHS Trust about a man who found 100,000 unread patient scans hidden in a car boot. Half of those scans were never reviewed by a specialist. Ever. Those patients, and their GPs, will go to their graves not knowing what was on those films. Nobody was prosecuted. Nobody was struck off. The people who hid the evidence kept their jobs. The doctor who found it lost his. SOURCES: @guardian @NHSBartsHealth @EastLondonLines