Physicist in cancer error is reinstated

A PHYSICIST whose 'error of professional judgement' led to nearly 1,000 cancer patients receiving lower than prescribed doses of radiation treatment over a 10-year period, is returning to her job.

Margaret Grieveson, the principal radiotherapy physicist at North Staffordshire Royal Infirmary, was singled out in the report by an independent inquiry set up after the mistake was discovered last December.

Yesterday, Stuart Gray, the hospital's general manager, said that most of the 11 recommendations made by the inquiry to guard against the possibility of such a mistake happening again had been introduced.

But solicitors representing relatives of some of the 598 cancer patients who later died attacked the report for what was described as its 'serious omissions'.

Lawyers representing the relatives of about 100 victims are to write to West Midlands Health Authority demanding an immediate admission of liability, or they will take legal action.

However, the authority said that it would make no such admission before a second investigation, examining the effects of the treatment on the patients, not expected until the end of the year.

Cancer specialists said the mistake in programming the X-ray machine, which resulted in some patients receiving radiation doses 30 per cent lower than prescribed, was extremely serious as patients were at risk of tumours regrowing.

The error was discovered last December by Miss Grieveson, who made the mistake in 1982, but was only revealed by the hospital in February when John Scoble and Murray Brunt, consultant clinical oncologists, wrote to survivors among the 989 patients treated. The only patients affected were treated using the isocentric technique, in which the X-ray machine is rotated around the body.

The mistake occurred when a correction factor that adjusts the dose according to the distance of the radiation source from the skin, was programmed unnecessarily into the system's computer. Miss Grieveson did not realise the computer had been programmed for such an allowance so a double correction was made.

But James Evans, the solicitor leading the claimants, said: 'There is not sufficient attention paid to the delay in finding the error - a mere nine years - how it was discovered, or how it arose.'