Surgery

Endoscopy expert witnesses

Listed endoscopy expert witnesses address the performance, completeness and reporting of diagnostic and therapeutic endoscopy. Missed lesions and procedural perforation are the two questions most often put.

Clinician viewing an endoscopy stack monitor in theatre, the practice endoscopy expert witnesses review

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The evidence

What an endoscopy expert witness is asked to determine

Endoscopy is unusually well documented: the request, bowel preparation quality, caecal intubation, withdrawal time, images and the report itself are all recorded. Where a lesion was missed, those measures usually determine whether the examination was adequate rather than whether the endoscopist was unlucky. Where the procedure was performed under sedation, the doses given and the recovery observations form a separate strand of the same record.

  • Whether the procedure was indicated by the symptoms and the pathway in force.
  • Whether preparation quality and completion were adequate for a reliable examination.
  • Whether a lesion was visible and should have been identified or biopsied.
  • Whether perforation or bleeding was recognised and managed without delay.
  • Whether the surveillance interval set after the procedure was appropriate.

Practitioners are listed across all four UK nations. Location can be narrowed in the register’s location listings before an instruction is made.

Claim contexts

Claims that instruct this discipline

These links describe the question endoscopy evidence can answer. They do not prescribe the scope of an individual instruction.

Search the register by the discipline used in the instruction.

See endoscopy listings

Report routes

Reports prepared

Procedure reports, images and quality measures support a records review report. A breach and causation report then addresses the outcome of any omission.

Where a delayed cancer diagnosis is alleged, oncology evidence is normally required as well. The report pages describe the scope of each route.

Endoscopy expert witness evidence

An endoscopist expert witness works from the recorded quality measures and images, not from the knowledge of what was found later.

The register publishes the listing; availability is confirmed with the practitioner. See the Joint Advisory Group on GI Endoscopy alongside the case material.

2,412 practitioners138 disciplinesFour UK nations

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Endoscopy listings