Negligent ACL surgery claim settled with Ashford & St Peter’s Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Our specialist medical negligence team has achieved £99,500 in compensation for a young client due to negligent performance of surgery to repair her ruptured anterior cruciate ligament (ACL).

Our client was a semi-professional rugby player and sports physiotherapist. After sustaining an injury to her right knee during training, she attended A&E at St Peter’s Hospital in Surrey, and was diagnosed with a complete rupture of her ACL. She was advised to undergo reconstruction surgery, which was then performed.

Our client’s recovery should have been uncomplicated. She required a period of physiotherapy and rehabilitation to rebuild her strength, and she should have been fit to return to competitive sport within six months.

In fact, her outcome from surgery was far from straightforward. She attempted the recommended physiotherapy and strength-based exercises but experienced persistent swelling. Her knee was painful and she could not achieve the range of movement that she needed or expected. Our client presented to her treating surgeon, Mr Jacob, to complain about her outcome and seek advice and further management. Following further scans, he advised that the scan was normal and to carry on with physiotherapy, and she was discharged.

Our client followed Mr Jacob’s advice. She instructed specialists in sports rehabilitation, which she paid for privately, and was diligent with her exercises. However, after 11 months of limited progress, and being met with the same problems of swelling, reduced movement and pain, and being unable to progress with the strengthening exercise she needed to perform to return to competitive sport, she sought a second opinion from a private orthopaedic surgeon, Mr Thompson. He took new scans of our client’s right knee and advised that her previous ACL reconstruction had not been performed particularly well and needed to be revised.

Our client was, by this point, 18 months on from her injury and had not been able to return to sport. She agreed to go ahead with surgery. She did not have insurance, and paid for her surgery privately. Because of the way in which the original surgery had been performed, Mr Thompson had to use bone grafts to fill the ACL tunnels before performing a second procedure to finalise the reconstruction. From the first revision operation, it took our client 18 months to further rehabilitate her knee (approximately 36 months since the initial injury).

Post-operatively our client has experienced an improved outcome, but she has not returned to competitive sport. She instructed our specialist orthopaedic solicitors to investigate a negligence claim. We obtained supportive expert evidence from an orthopaedic surgeon who was of the opinion that the original ACL reconstruction had been performed negligently. As a result, the reconstructed ACL was never going to give our client the movement that she needed to return to competitive sport, and caused her to need revision surgery. The expert was also critical of Mr Jacob for not informing our client of the poorly performed surgery during his post-operative review, which would have enabled her to have revision surgery sooner.

A pre-action letter of claim was sent to the defendant trust, which elicited an admission of negligence in our client’s care. Following those admissions, we then investigated the financial effect of the negligence for our client, including the impact on her ability to return to semi-professional rugby, and also her ambitions for transitioning to work as a sports-club physiotherapist. We agreed a resolution of the claim that reflected our client’s injuries and losses.

Arran Macleod, senior associate in the medical negligence team, comments: “We are seeing a number of claims relating to the performance of ACL reconstruction surgery. When this procedure is performed negligently in an elite sportsperson, the need for remedial treatment can delay (or in some cases prevent) a return to elite sport, and the implications from a career and financial perspective can be significant.”