Disgraced doctor Krishna Singh has been blamed for the death of a 69-year-old gran, with her family telling how he twice ignored signs that she was seriously ill.
Singh, 72, was last month jailed for 12 years for sexually assaulting 47 women – including teenagers, mums-to-be and a rape victim – while a GP in Coatbridge.
Now grieving daughter Fiona Mortimer, whose beloved mum Linda McLenaghan died of lung cancer four years ago, has told how a complaint to NHS Lanarkshire was upheld and said: “He failed my mum medically and morally.”
Fiona told how her mum had been 30 minutes from death after taking ill in 2016; and was later only finally diagnosed with cancer on a hospital visit after months of ill health. By then nothing could be done and she died 14 weeks later.
As she lay on her death bed, Linda said: “This is Dr Singh’s fault. I told him and told him and told him I wasn’t well.”
Fiona said: “He must have got his medical licence out of a lucky bag – he wasn’t fit to be a doctor. I would always request to see others because I felt you would go in to see him and he spent time asking how the family was rather than what I went in for.
“I felt he was checking books to check if he was right. He would even come up to the house to see my mum and read the paper before examining her.”
Fiona, 40, said of her mum’s illness in 2016: “She had been going to see him with diarrhoea and sickness but he just told her repeatedly it was a bad bug.
“Five weeks on, she couldn’t string a sentence together so I took her straight to hospital – doctors said if we had waited another 30 minutes she would have been dead because her potassium levels were so low.
“I went into the surgery and pulled him up about it in front of everyone. He was very blasé about it as if he didn’t take it seriously.”
Mum Linda, who had a history of heart disease and COPD and had had non-Hodgkinsons cancer at 25, then felt really poorly, breathless and with sickness and diarrhoea in 2018.
Fiona said: “Dr Singh told her he didn’t need to see her, [that] it was all down to her COPD, and gave antibiotics and steroids.
“She was contacting him at least once a week saying she still did not feel great. There was a rapid change in her breathing and simple daily tasks she couldn’t do any more.
“Her steroids are normally just for seven days but she had been on them and antibiotics from January until April and never got to see the doctor; she developed a pain in her left ribs and her breathing was getting worse.”
Singh said on the phone she must have pulled a muscle, but two weeks later she was referred to the renal unit because of her pain – and it was only when she had a fall at home after collapsing from dehydration because of the sickness and diarrhoea that she was finally diagnosed with cancer.
Fiona said: “When she went to Monklands Hospital she told them she hadn’t felt well for months. They performed a bronchoscopy and discovered a mass on her left lung.”
Singh also failed to follow up the renal unit’s request for blood to be taken in May which may have led to an earlier diagnosis.
Fiona lodged a complaint with NHS Lanarkshire which was upheld. The judgment stated: “The quality of the medical records in the practice is poor and therefore this presents us with difficulties in finding clear evidence of the clinical thought process of the doctors concerned, nor justification.”
She said: “I want him to pay for what he did to my mum. It was medical negligence. He has completely ruined my life. I am lost without my mum and I have lost trust in doctors.”
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