Welwyn Garden City hospital trust apologises for ‘faulty’ cancer machine

A WOMAN’S death was NOT caused by a faulty machine that misdiagnosed her cancer treatment four years ago, according to the NHS trust that carried out the test.

The East and North Hertfordshire NHS Trust has responded to a report in yesterday’s Mail on Sunday on the death of Tracey Kindley, a mum-of-one from Shillington, Beds.

Mrs Kindley died of breast cancer on October 28, aged 43, and her husband has blamed the QE2 Hospital in WGC for her death, after a diagnostic machine used by the hospital’s pathology department gave a “false negative” reading for oestrogen levels back in 2005, when she was first diagnosed.

Mr Kindley said the erroneous results effectively denied his wife other forms of treatment.

A spokesman for the trust, which manages the QE2, apologised for the false diagnosis, but added: “Mrs Kindley had a form of breast cancer where sadly no treatment would have prevented its spreading to other parts of her body.

“The pathology laboratory at the QE2 was working to satisfactory standards and the result reported to Mrs Kindley’s clinicians was sufficient on which to base treatment choices.”

For more on this story, see this week’s Welwyn Hatfield Times, out Wednesday.