The Courier has stood side by side the victims of disgraced NHS Tayside surgeon Professor Sam Eljamel during their fight for a public inquiry.
We exposed the extent of the shameful affair in March 2015 when former Dundee DJ Pat Kelly told Graeme Strachan he was the victim of a botched operation eight years earlier at the hands of Eljamel.
The story prompted many more victims to come forward but their calls for a full inquiry were rejected by Shona Robison, then health secretary and now deputy first minister, who trusted NHS Tayside’s handling of the crisis.
Fall from grace
The Courier spent the next four years following Eljamel’s dramatic fall from grace as he continued to jet around the globe on lucrative speaking engagements while his victims were left in agony.
As the shameful affair threatened to fade from public consciousness in recent times, we refused to let health chiefs and politicians duck questions on how they reacted to the scandal.
In August, Justin Bowie’s reporting cast serious doubt on what Eljamel’s supervision entailed – with NHS Tayside’s hierarchy slammed in a bombshell report just weeks later for never directly monitoring him in the operating theatre AFTER concerns were raised about his work.
A key probe as part of the “due diligence” review, centred on the recruitment process that saw the Libyan medic hired, was only launched as a result of a story in The Courier revealing he falsely claimed on his own website that he had a specialist US medical degree.
Three months earlier, Eljamel victim Leann Sutherland opened her heart to us on how the rogue doctor left her in so much pain she begged her own mum to suffocate her.
Leann, a 33-year-old businesswoman, said: “I begged my mum to murder her daughter.”
She later added: “I can’t have the career I want. I can’t have children.”
Key figures in Eljamel scandal
We also told the story of Fife gran Theresa Mallett who revealed 11 years of pain – following her botched Eljamel operation – came out when she heckled First Minister Humza Yousaf at the SNP’s independence convention in Dundee.
Weeks later senior oncologist Dr Phyllis Windsor, a former NHS Tayside colleague of the rogue doctor, revealed to The Courier she refused to let him operate on her and instead travelled to London for a major procedure after being diagnosed with a pituitary tumour in 2006.
In September, just days after turning the spotlight on the key figures in the scandal, Alasdair Clark lifted the lid on the legal hurdles facing those who wish to bring a claim against NHS Tayside.
‘The Courier stood by me’
Pat Kelly – who also hailed the “immense” cross-party support from politicians Liz Smith, Willie Rennie and Michael Marra – said: “The Courier has been so supportive over the years.
“With the original story, I was making an accusation against a very senior surgeon and some of these accusations would have been very difficult to believe.
“But The Courier stuck by what I was saying and trusted the evidence.”
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