Surgeon is struck off after three “never events”

A senior surgeon has been struck off the UK medical register for his role in three surgical “never events” in a two year period.

“A never event is something that should never, ever happen,” Michael Zeigerman, an expert witness for the General Medical Council, told a medical practitioners’ tribunal in Manchester. “It’s so serious that [England’s health secretary] Jeremy Hunt himself has every single one of them written in his office—and we have three of them here.”

The three botched operations were the work of Lawal Haruna, 59, a specialty doctor in general surgery at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. In September 2013, while doing an emergency laparoscopic appendicectomy, he failed to identify …