Treatment and trust: Cancer failures must not happen again

No-one can begrudge the payments to the more than 30 women affected by Miss Markandoo's failures when she worked at Barnsley Hospital in the period up to July 2006. They would surely recognise that while the money can provide some kind of chance to improve the quality of their lives, it will never be compensation in the true sense of the word.

What will concern Yorkshire people, however, both patients and taxpayers, is exactly how Miss Markandoo was able to carry on putting sick women further at risk for so long and why she was being paid up to 122,000 a year.

Cancer is not known as the big C for nothing. It is, perhaps, the illness that people dread more than any other and, as such, patients expect high standards of care as a basic requirement. Yet not only did Miss Markandoo fail to provide this, Barnsley Hospital NHS Foundation Trust did not see quickly enough the threat she posed. That she was eventually suspended – but still permitted by the General Medical Council to practise in the NHS under certain conditions – will be of little consolation to those women who she failed.

Now the trust is saddled with a bill of nearly 1m, which is set to rise further because three more cases are still the subject of negotiation.

Having admitted negligence in several cases and been subject to a GMC investigation, the trust must now set out the lessons it has learned. This is important not just to restore public confidence but to protect the reputation of the overwhelming majority of skilled and dedicated NHS staff in Barnsley.

The only lasting good from Miss Puvaneswary's botched operations can be that such an appalling series of events never happens again.