Surgeon in U.K. pleads guilty to branding his initials on patients' livers
Patients going into surgery typically have a list of questions for their doctor. Now they may need to add another: Are you going to brand your initials on my internal organs?
Simon Bramhall, a liver, spleen, and pancreatic surgeon at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, West Midlands, has admitted to searing the initials “SB” inside his liver transplant patients. According to the Denver Post, Bramhall used an electric beam — typically used to cauterize blood vessels — to brand his initials onto the livers of two transplant patients. He has pleaded guilty to two counts of assault.
The brands, while shocking and invasive, would typically heal as the patient recovered from the transplant. But according to the Telegraph, one patient needed a follow-up operation, and that’s when doctors discovered the branding. Bramhall was suspended from the hospital in December 2013 — only to be reinstated in April 2014 pending an internal investigation. The following month, he resigned, citing a “stress-induced illness.”
Bramhall is now facing criminal charges, and has pleaded guilty to assault charges at Birmingham Crown Court. The case is “without legal precedent in criminal law,” the Telegraph reports.
As the case moves forward, Crown Prosecution Service specialist prosecutor Elizabeth Reid sums up the case for the prosecution: “It was an intentional application of unlawful force to a patient whilst anaesthetised. His acts in marking the livers of those patients, in a wholly unnecessary way, were deliberate and conscious acts on his part. Those assaults were wrong not just ethically, but also criminally. It was an abuse of the trust placed in him by the patients.”
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