7:30am Saturday 13th March 2010
By Claire Lomax
A Bradford nurse who has suffered more than 20 years of debilitating back pain has been refused surgery on the NHS.
Parveen Hussain, of Middlebrook Way, Fairweather Green, has been denied the treatment by NHS Bradford and Airedale, despite other patients in Yorkshire being funded by their primary care trusts for the same surgery.
Mrs Hussain, 45, who is married with two daughters and works for NHS Bradford and Airedale, has now resorted to a bank loan to pay privately for the £11,000 keyhole surgery on her spine.
She damaged her back working as a nurse at St Luke’s Hospital in 1987 and has suffered with chronic lower back pain since as well as pain in both legs. An MRI scan has revealed two bulging discs and a tear as the source of her pain.
Over the years she has explored every treatment option, both on the NHS and privately, including physiotherapy, acupuncture, reflexology and injections.
She has seen an osteopath, a chiropractor and been referred to Leeds hospitals twice to see a neurosurgeon and an orthopaedic surgeon, who were unable to help. Six years ago she began taking opiates for the pain and this medication is now causing severe side effects, including chronic headaches, insomnia and two anaphylactic shock reactions.
A funding request was made in July last year by Mrs Hussain’s GP for her to have a treatment called endoscopic laser foraminoplasty (EDF), by surgeon Martin Knight, of The Spinal Foundation, a not-for-profit, charitable organisation which pioneers minimally invasive spine surgery treatment.
Mr Knight has treated thousands of patients with an 80 per cent success rate, including patients funded on the NHS from other parts of the country, including people funded by two Yorkshire primary care trusts.
“In the last five to six years I have had no quality of life,” said Mrs Hussain. “The treatment offered by Mr Knight represents my last resort.”
She said the decision by the PCT not to fund the treatment was like a “kick in the teeth”.
“It is all down to money and no value is put on the quality of a human life,” she said. “People are being funded on the NHS and if I lived in a different area, who knows.”
A spokesman for NHS Bradford and Airedale said: “Every patient has a right to a wide range of treatments, but there are some which are not routinely funded by the NHS. In such cases the local clinical priorities committee considers exceptional requests for funding, looking carefully at a number of things before it makes a decision.
“The committee may not agree to fund treatment if there are concerns about the safety of a procedure, if there is inconclusive clinical evidence that the treatment would help manage a patient’s condition or if the patient’s reasons for needing it were not felt to be exceptional.
“Alternative treatments and procedures may always be considered by a GP or consultant, subject to meeting funding criteria. All decisions are made after careful and sympathetic discussion of all the available facts. However, if a patient or their GP or consultant is not happy about how the committee reached its decision, they can write to an appeals panel.”
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