NHS trust admits 20 women underwent unnecessary mastectomies

• County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust has told the BBC that 20 women underwent mastectomies it now considers unnecessary.¹
• The figure comes from a review of breast-service cases between January 2023 and February 2025. Of 514 cases examined so far, 315 patients were found to have suffered harm, including 77 who suffered significant harm.¹
• The trust has received complaints or concerns from 640 former patients. One patient is known to have died, and some cancers were missed or diagnosed late.¹
• The review has not yet established the full scale of the failure. The trust’s board is due to decide on 24 September whether to widen the look-back, potentially to cases dating from 2015.²

The trust has not published a case-by-case explanation of how the 20 mastectomies were identified, nor has it announced a compensation scheme. It says patients whose care is found to have caused harm will be contacted, while claims are handled independently by NHS Resolution.² Women can bring claims directly or through legal representatives.

The failures were not confined to individual surgical decisions. An independent governance review found warnings about high rates of benign surgery, repeated operations and poor reconstruction rates were not acted on. It said the breast service operated with weak oversight, inadequate contract monitoring and a culture in which senior leaders accepted reassurance instead of demanding evidence that patients were safe.³

The trust has apologised and says it has ended the outsourcing arrangement for breast cancer services, appointed new specialist surgeons and strengthened multidisciplinary review. But the police investigation by Durham Constabulary and the National Crime Agency, alongside the unresolved question of how far the NHS review should reach, means the 20 cases are unlikely to be the final figure.¹

Footnotes

1. BBC report reproduced by Yahoo News: “Twenty women had breasts removed needlessly, says NHS trust” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

2. County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust: breast services support, improvements and next steps ↩ ↩²

3. County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust: Independent External Review of Governance within the Breast Surgery Services ↩