Chemo bungle patients call on Premier Jay Weatherill for compensation at inquiry

UPDATE: Chemotherapy bungle victims will be offered compensation by the State Government with Health Minister, Jack Snelling, confirming this would happen soon.

CHEMOTHERAPY bungle victims will be offered compensation by the State Government with Health Minister, Jack Snelling, confirming this would happen soon.

“We are working on an offer of compensation that should be offered to the patients and their families and we want to have that offer out there very soon,” Mr Snelling said.

The victims and families will still need to get legal advice but the Government will pick up their legal costs if they challenge the size of the offer

“Of course we encourage patients and their families to seek independent legal advice, which the state government will pay for if they feel the offer we will provide is unsatisfactory to them.”

No dollar amount has been mentioned yet the Premier Jay Weatherill will meet relevant officers to start the process.

It comes after bungle victim Andrew Knox today accused Mr Snelling of backing away from a breakthrough offer by Mr Weatherill, that compensation would be offered to the ten patients or their families.

Mr Snelling said that, like Mr Weatherill, he wanted compensation settled quickly.

“I am very, very keen, like the Premier, that these patients be offered compensation as soon as possible,” he said on ABC 891.

But Mr Knox said Mr Snelling seemed not to be endorsing a new approach of going to the victims with an offer of compensation, instead telling them to mount ten individual claims, each with their own legal heads of claim.

“The Minister has recanted,” Mr Knox said, after Mr Snelling maintained there was “nothing new” in Mr Weatherill’s offer.

Mr Knox said the Minister was wrong to say there had been ongoing dialogue between the Government’s insurers and the victims.

“We had an email telling us to lawyer up and the verbal advice to one of us not to put a claim in until you have ‘a heads of claim’,” Mr Knox said

He called on Mr Weatherill to sit down with the victims or their families — two of the ten have died — and tell them what the Government planned to do, particularly in the case of Marino man, Bronte Higham, who has only weeks to live.

Speaking from Kuala Lumpur on Tuesday, Mr Weatherill said he would next week ask that offers of compensation be made and that a firm timetable be provided.

The breakthrough follows harrowing evidence on Tuesday from victims of the scandal at the first meeting of the Legislative Council select committee, which is looking into the chemotherapy bungle and cover up.

One of the victims, Bronte Higham, who has only weeks to live, called himself “a dead man walking” and asked for compensation to be brought forward.

“I don’t know when I’m going to fall off the perch,” Mr Higham, 67, told the inquiry. “I don’t want my family to have to go for years asking for compensation. This has been one big stuff-up.”

Mr Higham’s wife, Ricki, broke down when she told the committee how horrific it was to be diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia. They had gone to Flinders Medical Centre expecting the best possible care. “If he’d got the treatment he should have got in the first place ...” she said, before stopping in tears.

Andrew Knox, a former industrial advocate who was one of 10 chemo patients underdosed at FMC, said the committee was the last forum for the victims seeking accountability.

“This is no normal inquiry ... this is a matter of life and death,” he said.

Victim Andrew Knox gives evidence at the chemo bungle inquiry. Picture: Campbell Brodie.

Mr Knox, 67, who was treated with an incorrect chemo dose despite hospital staff discovering the error in the protocol three days earlier, said the blunder was not an isolated event and the committee must act. “This is the only opportunity any of the victims have of stopping this happening again,” he said. “Without a strong finding by the committee, it will happen again.”

He said Professor Villis Marshall, the head of the independent inquiry called by Mr Snelling last year, found in his report failures of governance and disclosure.

But Prof Marshall confided to him the culture of hidden responsibility was beyond his power to change.

“If you make a mistake in the world, you stand up and take responsibility,” Mr Knox said. “It’s the old joke; ‘we bury our mistakes’ and that’s the truth of it.”

Mr Knox tabled evidence relating to the key players in the scandal and wants the committee to call senior doctors and bureaucrats for questioning. He said highly paid clinicians failed to follow proper process and had done things a nurse would have been sacked for. “These people are not gods,” he said.

Cancer patient Bronte Higham’s wife Ricki breaks down while giving evidence at the inquiry. Picture: Campbell Brodie.

He said an inquiry by the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency into eight clinicians was of no use as its findings were secret. “Don’t for a minute think there is closure in reporting to AHPRA because there is not,” he said.

Mr Knox said the Health Minister Jack Snelling had been lied to, and singled out Associate Professor Belinda Moyes, the former chief executive at southern Adelaide Local Health Network, who he said told the minister the victims were receiving support.

“Every time the minister or (SA Health chief executive) David Swan gave a directive, Professor Moyes says ‘no bloody way, I’m not doing that’,” he said.

“There was not a shadow of care or concern, it was about risk management from the outset.”

He told the committee Prof Moyes had moved to “greener pastures” in Geelong where, in

March, she was announced as the new chief executive of Barwon Health.

Mr Knox said the patients should not have been put in the position they were left in.

“It’s taken no small toll on us and our families to get here today,” he said.

The compensation offer is a breakthrough for victims who had been told to “lawyer up” and make their claims.

Victim’s harrowing testimony

“I’M a dead man walking,” relapsed leukaemia patient Bronte Higham earlier told the parliamentary inquiry into the underdosing of 10 Adelaide patients at the state’s two biggest hospitals.

Cancer patient Bronte Higham addresses the Parliamentary inquiry. Picture: Campbell Brodie.

Supported by his wife Ricki, Mr Higham called on the Premier, Jay Weatherill, to make an offer of compensation to the families.

“I don’t know when I’m going to fall off my perch ... the man who can pull strings is the Premier,” Mr Higham said.

Advocate for four of the families, Andrew Knox, who is in remission but fears a relapse, told the Legislative Council select committee he and Mr Higham were told by the State Government’s insurers SAICORP to “lawyer up”.

He also suggested SA Health had deliberately kept the 10 families apart.

“They don’t want a class action,” he said.

Mr Knox told the committee, headed by Liberal MLC Andrew McLachlan, it took a toll on the families to appear at the inquiry on Tuesday.

“The way we’ve been treated is just disgraceful,” he said.