Dr Yaser Jabbar: Mother says daughter, 11, had to use wheelchair after procedure with surgeon accused of ‘inappropriate’ operations
The mother of a young girl treated by a surgeon accused of carrying out “inappropriate and unnecessary” operations has told Sky News her daughter had to use a wheelchair for nearly two years after surgery.
Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) has launched an investigation into the cases of 721 children after an expert review found Dr Yaser Jabbar was alleged to have caused “serious harm” through “unacceptable” treatment, according to a lawyer acting for families of some of the young patients.
Now Claire Osborne, whose daughter Ella underwent corrective surgery on her leg by Dr Jabber in the summer of 2020, has called on a 2023 expert report by the Royal College of Surgeons to be made public.
Dr Yasser Jabbar. Pic: Linkedin
It comes as Duabi’s CMC Hospital – where Dr Jabbar has recently worked – confirmed it had suspended the surgeon.
Ella was 11 years old when she had the operation under Dr Jabbar after she developed a condition called genu valgum, in which the knees tilt inward while the ankles remain apart. She also has multiple complex needs.
She had already undergone the same corrective procedure with a different doctor, but her recovery after the second operation was more painful and took longer.
Ella had a second corrective surgery on her leg in 2020 under Dr Jabbar
“She just kept saying to me all the time, ‘Mum, it hurts, it hurts’. And the way she was walking was so strange. It was like her knees were overlapping and they were clicking for every step she took,” Ms Osborne said.
“At one point she would do 10 miles on the bike and it got to the point where she couldn’t even walk around a supermarket with me.”
Ella was also forced to rely on a wheelchair during this time, and Ms Osborne and her husband could also feel a screw from a plate inserted in Ella’s leg through her skin.
“Ella was just so miserable. She was in pain. You can feel it as a parent – you know how a child is normally and you know when there’s something wrong.”
Read more: Children left in pain by surgeon’s ‘inappropriate and unnecessary’ operations
Ms Osborne says she consistently raised concerns about her daughter’s recovery, with Dr Jabbar telling her in a follow-up appointment: “If I’m not worried, you shouldn’t be worried.”
After consulting a private surgeon, Ms Osborne asked for a second opinion, and soon after Ella had a third corrective surgery by another doctor at Great Ormond Street.
Ms Osborne said that the surgeon “called it a miraculous correction”.
“What she did, the angle at which she corrected Ella’s leg, was huge.”
Ella and her mother Claire, who said she was ‘frustrated’ by not knowing what was in the expert review
Now, Ms Osborne is calling for a 2023 Royal College of Surgeons review – conducted before the review in which Ella’s initial operation was one of 721 cases examined – to be made public.
“Without knowing facts, without knowing what, why, where, when you’re still kind of in limbo. Because this report’s out there. You know, it says things, but you don’t know what,” she said.
“It’s frustrating because obviously if the hospital had known that things were going on prior to Ella being treated, maybe Ella could have been saved.
“Without knowing what the hospital knew from the report, we’ll never know.”
Ella is one of 721 patients reviewed by the Royal College of Surgeons
Of the 42 cases looked at as part of the GOSH probe so far, 22 children are believed to have come to harm as a result of operations Dr Jabbar carried out.
Ms Osborne has now set up a support group for other families who have been affected.
Amy Kirk, an associate at Fletchers Solicitors – a firm that is representing some of the families involved – said: “It’s really important the review is given to the families in full as they are already not feeling heard [and that] the report is released in a timely fashion and that a full investigation is done.
A spokesperson for Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children said: “We know that the patients and families affected will be extremely distressed by the issues raised by the review we commissioned into our orthopedic service.
“This is not what they should expect from any service at our hospital. To all of them we wish to say we are deeply sorry.
“As we complete case reviews, the outcomes of these will be shared with the patient and their family, regardless of whether harm has been found or not.
“As we have said previously, we will share a summary of the report in our public board, but we will be sharing it first with our families.”
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Dr Jabbar, who qualified from St George’s Hospital Medical School in London, was registered with a licence to practise until January of this year, according to the General Medical Council website.
GOSH said he had not worked there since 2022. The Sunday Times reported he only stepped down from his role last September after an 11-month sabbatical on full pay.
UK
‘I thought I’d be dead by now’ – can Labour use Blair template to cut ‘shameful’ levels of rough sleeping?
Ian Harrison watches a film in which, 16 years ago, he is on the streets begging for money in Covent Garden.
Recorded in 2008, we see a fresh-faced 19-year-old Ian, who has been evicted from his flat, telling the camera he is going to take as many drugs as he can get.
“I want to get so far gone, all my problems go away, just for tonight,” he says.
Watching this, 35-year-old Ian blinks slowly.
He nods and lets out a big sigh. Then his teenage self says something prescient: “Nothing changes, only time, and the people I’m begging from.”
Ian nods again: “He is right. Look where I am now!”
Ian is still homeless, his face now wears the years he’s lived on the streets and the addiction to heroin and crack he is still battling.
And although he has a room in a hostel for the moment, his life is on the same cliff-edge it was all those years ago.
It is significant that Ian became homeless in the late 2000s, towards the end of the Blair/Brown era, when a drive to tackle rough sleeping had successfully reduced numbers on the streets by two-thirds and kept them low for a sustained period.
Ian’s been living rough since 2008, when he was still a teenager
He was in a film years ago showing him begging in London
The 2008 financial crisis and subsequent global economic downturn saw homelessness numbers begin to rise, and steadily do so for a decade until a period during the pandemic triggered a drive to get people off the streets.
But now it is peaking again and last year Ian was among 11,993 rough sleepers in London – the highest ever recorded in the capital.
Labour‘s deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, described the situation as “shameful” as she took over the task of sorting it out.
Deputy PM Angela Rayner is in charge of tackling the problem. Pic: PA
Ms Rayner will lead a new cross-government taskforce to tackle the issue, which has echoes of Tony Blair‘s cross-department approach.
However, the success of Blair’s rough sleeping unit, launched in 1999, was also attributed to its focus on attempting to tackle the causes of homelessness, not just finding people places to stay.
This is something Ian feels is lacking now.
Despite having a roof over his head, his single room looks like the streets have followed him in.
Ian grew up in care and says he never had anyone to show him the basic things in life
The floor is covered in rubbish, the sink and walls stained, flies buzz around a small boxy space that smells not dissimilar to the cardboard home he lived in under the Hammersmith flyover a few months ago.
Ian grew up in care and says he hasn’t learned how to look after himself.
He says: “I struggle with a lot of basic things in life. I never had parents to say brush your teeth, get in the shower do this, do that, when you grow up into an adult you don’t have that stuff.”
‘Hard to be stable in a place like this’
He is off the drugs and has a prescription for methadone, but says his environment doesn’t help.
“It’s hard to be stable in a place like this, because it’s a very unstable place to be in,” he says.
“If you are picking someone up and putting them in a hostel with 26 other people who are all addicts, it’s not going to take long before it’s going to rub off on you.”
He is in supported accommodation but says it doesn’t offer the support he needs, which is self-care, organisation and, frankly, a great deal of therapy.
No one has ever addressed the root causes of Ian’s problems.
Ian says his supported accommodation is not helping him get better
“From a very young age, you know, I went through a lot of sexual abuse, mental abuse, physical abuse, which was sustained daily, for years,” he says.
“They say you need therapy, but to get the therapy you need to be completely clean of drugs and alcohol for a couple of years. But that’s part of the illness, it’s part of the symptoms of the illness.”
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‘Stuck in a merry-go-round for 20 years’
It will be the task of Ms Rayner’s cross-department team to try to turn around the lives of people like Ian – and it won’t be cheap.
But the Sky News producer who filmed the footage back in 2008 and has known Ian since that time, has seen him go through countless hostels (around 30, says Ian) and mental institutions, only to eventually end up back out on the streets.
The long-term cost of not solving Ian’s problems is incalculable.
“I’ve been stuck in a merry-go-round for 20 years,” he says.
“l become homeless, get into a hostel, become homeless. You give up.”
Asked what his 19-year-old self would have hoped to being doing in his 30s, Ian says: “To be honest, I thought I’d be dead by now. And I wouldn’t have cared if I was.”
But Ian does care now.
A wish list, written on his hostel wall, reads: “Stop using all drugs, save up more cash, care 4 self better, start up business, go to gym, get routine, have camping holiday.”
To achieve this, he is going to need the kind of help that has eluded him all his life.
UK
Northern Lights put on spectacular display as people share their sightings of the aurora borealis
The Northern Lights have returned to the UK in spectacular style, visible across huge parts of the country.
This year, the famed aurora has made a couple of appearances as far south as the UK, producing stunning pictures as a result.
The phenomena is chiefly influenced by geomagnetic storms, of which the Met Office said there was a “severe” one due to reach Earth overnight on 10 October.
Great Chart Church, Ashford, Kent. Pic: PA
Brill, Buckinghamshire. Pic: Chris Noyce
Loddon, Norfolk. Pic: Michael Hewstone
Reading, Berkshire
This brought sightings of the aurora all over the UK on Thursday night, with reports that it was visible across Britain, as far south as Sussex.
The Met Office had said that viewings were likely in Scotland and Northern Ireland and possible in the north of England and the Midlands.
However, thanks in part to relatively clear skies, they were visible for huge numbers of Britons well beyond this.
Tallington Lakes, Lincolnshire
Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire
Pic: Nathan Chislet, Ebbw Vale, South Wales
Met Office spokesperson Stephen Dixon said that further residual viewings could be possible over the weekend – but this is likely to be confined to the likes of Scotland.
Rain and cloud could also obscure further viewings over the weekend.
The aurora in northeast Lincolnshire
Blackrock, Dublin
Llandudno, North Wales
Deal, Kent
Near peak solar cycle
The auroras are most common over high polar latitudes but can sometimes spread south over parts of the UK.
The geomagnetic storms that chiefly influence them often originate from the sun, which works on a cycle of around 11 years with peak sunspot activity referred to as solar maximum.
Sunspots give the potential for Earth-directed releases of large bursts of energy, called coronal mass ejections (CME), which can lead to aurora visibility.
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St Neots, Cambridgeshire
Kilmacolm, Inverclyde. Pic: Louise Monaghan
Rugby, Warwickshire
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Mr Dixon said: “We’re near the peak of that solar cycle so there have been more space weather events in recent months.
“International prediction centres, including the Met Office Space Weather Operations Centre, are expecting solar maximum to be later this year or early next year.”
It will still be possible to see the Northern Lights once we pass solar maximum but there will be a decline in such activity.
Forecast for around 8.30pm on Thursday. Green means a 10%-40% chance of seeing the lights. Red is a near 90+% chance. Pic: NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center
The aurora displays occur when charged particles collide with gases in the Earth’s atmosphere around the magnetic polls.
As they smash into one another, they emit light at various wavelengths, creating the stunning sights.
Rebecca Adlington has welcomed the lifting of restrictions on baby loss certificates, saying her own has helped “bring home that [her baby] is part of the family”.
The Olympic swimmer lost her baby daughter, who she and her husband named Harper, at 20-weeks pregnant in October 2023.
It was Adlington’s second miscarriage in as many years, and she has since become an ambassador for baby loss counselling charity Petals.
Speaking on The UK Tonight with Sarah-Jane Mee, Adlington welcomed a recent change which means anyone who has suffered a miscarriage in the UK can apply for a baby loss certificate.
Until this week, the service was only available to parents who had experienced a loss since September 2018 but this restriction has now been lifted.
Rebecca Adlington. Pic: PA
“We’ve got one, it’s actually framed,” Adlington said. “As soon as we found out about the certificates, we applied.
“It was something we absolutely wanted to have because we don’t have many things around the house that make her feel part of the family, and she is part of the family.
“It really kind of brings it home that she is part of the family. My kids know, they always say ‘Harper’s my sister’.”
While the certificates “are not going to take away the pain… they’re so fundamental to make [the loss] part of your life”, she continued.
“With miscarriage, there aren’t many things you can hold on to.”
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Adlington and Andy Parsons married in 2021. Pic: PA
As the one-year anniversary of her miscarriage approaches, Adlington said she and her husband Andy Parsons are planning to check in with their counsellor.
“Both times, it was incredibly difficult to go through so I’m so, so grateful I had support,” she said. “I’ve had thousands of messages from people who didn’t have the best support or kept it to themselves.”
The change in rules surrounding the certificates coincides with baby loss awareness week.
All parents who have experienced a loss can now apply for one, for free, via a government website.
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