A rogue surgeon who harmed patients in a series of botched operations has pocketed around £1million of pension payments since fleeing the country.
Professor Sam Eljamel, who was head of neurosurgery at Dundee’s Ninewells Hospital, has banked the astonishing sum from his combined NHS pensions over the past 11 years.
The disgraced medic was suspended in December 2013, resigned from NHS Tayside the following year, and then removed his name from the medical register in 2015.
Campaigners fear he harmed more than 200 patients in Scotland. He is now back in his native Libya, where he continues to operate on patients at hospitals which promote his work on social media.
Eljamel retired from his job in Dundee in June 2014, which earned him upwards of £100,000 annually, and began receiving a pension of at least half that.
It has also been reported that he receives a pension from the time he spent working for the NHS in England. His lucrative index-linked retirement pot will have continued to grow even after he fled to North Africa.
Pat Kelly, the former Radio Tay presenter who was harmed by Eljamel in 2007 during surgery to supposedly correct spinal issues, told The Sunday Post: ‘It’s an utter disgrace that he has been paid a fortune every single month by our own government.
Eljamel was head of neurosurgery at Dundee’s Ninewells Hospital
Professor Eljamel has picked up around £1m in pension payments over 11 years
‘I’ve been unable to work since Eljamel butchered me, and I was forced to draw down money from my pension just to keep going.
‘I know many others who have had to do the same thing.’
And Dougie Pymm, whose wife Annemarie was left paralysed and unable to speak properly after an Eljamel operation, told the newspaper he was ‘beyond rage’ knowing that the medic has been paid a pension for the past 11 years.
He said: ‘All the claims the Government didn’t know where he is are an utter sham when they’ve been paying him his pension all this time.
Eljamel must be laughing his head off at us all.’
A public inquiry is investigating the shamed surgeon’s tenure with NHS Tayside from 1994 to 2014, but earlier this year it was told that he had snubbed proceedings. Jamie Dawson, KC, senior counsel at the Eljamel Inquiry, warned it was ‘inevitable’ the probe would contain ‘substantial criticism’ of him but all efforts to contact him had failed.
When the scandal began to emerge, NHS Tayside accepted Eljamel’s retirement request, and the General Medical Council allowed him to voluntarily withdraw his registration.
It meant he was allowed to walk away with no black mark on his record so he can work elsewhere.
Meanwhile, his former patients say they are still being blocked from claiming justice because of a three-year time bar on claims.
NHS Tayside yesterday said: ‘NHS Tayside does not provide a pension scheme. Pensions are administered by the Scottish Public Pensions Agency to NHS employees on behalf of the Scottish Government.’
The pensions agency was approached for comment.
Eljamel is also subject to a Police Scotland investigation into his conduct called Operation Stringent, which began in 2018.
