Dean Stalham can remember all too clearly the way his daughter’s doctor behaved whenever he graced them with his presence.
All smiles and success, Dean reflects, he would ‘sweep into the ward and talk himself up as some sort of miracle man’.
And for a time, the Ramsgate-based artist and charity worker believed orthopaedic surgeon Yaser Jabbar might well be one.
Always quick to reassure, Jabbar insisted Dean’s young daughter Bunty – born with a rare condition that causes tumours to form on nerve tissue and eat away at the bone – was receiving the very best care.
Under his specialist hands, he emphasised, the leg she was in danger of losing could be saved. ‘He sold her a dream,’ as Dean puts it.
So, at Jabbar’s suggestion, his sunny, spirited and brave daughter had multiple unsuccessful and painful procedures. All in vain.
In 2020, aged just seven, Bunty was told her left leg would need to be amputated below the knee after all – a devastating blow after so many surgeries to save it.
Far more devastating still, however, has been learning that many of those were unnecessary.
For along with dozens of other parents, Dean has since found himself confronting the unthinkable reality that his daughter was not just a patient but a victim of a man now dubbed the ‘Del Boy’ doctor – a surgeon who, far from helping the vulnerable children in his care, left many with life-changing injuries and irreparable damage courtesy of what one mother told the Daily Mail yesterday was a ‘God complex’.
Bunty Stalham was born with a rare condition that causes tumours to form on nerve tissue and eat away at the bone, and underwent a number of surgeries
Yaser Jabbar, dubbed the ‘Del Boy’ doctor, was a surgeon at Great Ormond Street Hospital who, far from helping the vulnerable children in his care, left many with life-changing injuries and irreparable damage
Some were as young as four months. Amputation, permanent deformities and chronic pain are among Jabbar’s dreadful legacy, alongside muscle and nerve damage. One patient was left with one leg an astonishing 20cm shorter than the other.
Then there are the deep psychological scars inflicted on young patients: nightmares, flashbacks and, in some cases, a fear of hospitals so deep that they cannot face further corrective surgery.
Little wonder, then, that when news of the now 45-year-old’s actions surfaced in autumn 2024, it provoked widespread shock – not least because it unfolded at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), an institution regarded as one of the finest children’s hospitals in the world.
Then there was the sheer potential scale of the damage. Between 2017 and 2022 – the years of his tenure at GOSH – Jabbar treated 789 patients, as well as an unknown number in private practice. How many, exactly, had suffered at his hands?
Only this week has there been an answer. Following the publication of a long-awaited report, it emerged that 94 children endured harm, 36 of them ‘severe’.
Among the ghastly litany of failures experienced by those unfortunate enough to be under Jabbar’s care were misplaced implants, injuries to bones and procedures that never needed to take place at all.
Could there a more catastrophic betrayal of trust by a hospital? Perhaps only the fact that many parents who raised concerns were repeatedly dismissed.
Bunty’s father, Dean, who today believes Jabbar took it upon himself to be the ‘Almighty saviour’ of a limb that was beyond saving, says multiple surgeries were of ‘no benefit to Bunty whatsoever’
Great Ormond Street Hospital is regarded as one of the finest children’s hospitals in the world
‘I was questioning this man for years because things just didn’t seem right,’ recalls Dean, who today believes Jabbar took it upon himself to be the ‘Almighty saviour’ of a limb that was beyond saving, leading to multiple surgeries that were ‘no benefit to Bunty whatsoever. I challenged him on multiple occasions but he was so dismissive. I complained to the hospital too – and that was dismissed as well. I was repeatedly told he’d done nothing wrong.’
This, despite the fact that, it later emerged, Jabbar’s reputation among some colleagues was such that staff working alongside him privately admitted they would not want him operating on their own friends or family.
As Caroline Murgatroyd, of Hudgell Solicitors representing a number of families in a civil action against GOSH, told the Daily Mail yesterday: ‘The Trust admitted in its report that there was a serious incident involving him in 2021. Then, in 2022, further concerns were raised – and when they looked back, there had already been seven separate complaints against Mr Jabbar. Why did it take so many to sttart things rolling?’
That question will no doubt prompt ongoing soul-searching at Great Ormond Street, from where chief executive Matthew Shaw this week said the hospital was ‘profoundly sorry’ for what had happened and had made ‘significant changes both to the orthopaedic service and across the hospital’.
From Yaser Jabbar himself, however, there has been silence.
He was last known to be living in Dubai, having moved there in late 2022 to take up a post at the Clemenceau Medical Center after voluntarily giving up his licence to practise in the UK. He left that role in September 2024 after news of an investigation became public and his current whereabouts are unknown.
Almost as baffling as how long he went unchecked is the question of motivation. Jabbar appeared to be the consummate surgeon, with an impressive CV.
While little is known about his family background, he trained at London’s St George’s Hospital, graduating in 2004 and registering with the General Medical Council the same year. He completed specialist orthopaedic training in Oxford and London, spent a year working in hospitals in Melbourne and Sydney, then returned to the UK, working at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital before arriving at GOSH in 2017.
His speciality was limb straightening and lengthening in children born with congenital deformities or disease – complex surgery involving circular steel frames and tension wires attached to bones that are surgically broken and gradually stretched to allow new bone to form.
There was no shortage of candidates at GOSH, a hospital long synonymous – until now – with paediatric excellence and where Jabbar quickly acquired a reputation as a confident surgeon. ‘Too confident,’ is how Mark Harvey, father of George Davison, now 17, from Essex puts it.
‘He was a likeable guy. At the time I said he was like the Del Boy of doctors. He would make jokes and was very confident.’
George was born with a rare condition affecting bone development and had multiple surgeries from the age of two, involving steel pins and months of recovery.
In June 2021, Jabbar operated on George’s wrist and arm using a metal Ilizarov frame – a procedure a Royal College of Surgeons report later concluded had not been properly discussed with the family. The surgery left George’s hand more deformed and him in continuing pain. ‘I trusted Jabbar,’ his father says. ‘It makes me sick that this happened.’
It is a sentiment echoed repeatedly by families affected by Jabbar’s actions, among them Claire Osborne from Fleet, Hampshire, who told the Daily Mail this week she believed Jabbar had a ‘God complex’. Her daughter Ella, now 16, was born with a rare congenital disorder affecting multiple systems, including her bones.
In 2020, she was seen by Jabbar for genu valgum, a condition in which the knees angle inward. Jabbar’s solution was to screw a small metal plate, shaped like a figure of eight, to the bone to slow growth on one side while allowing the rest to develop normally. ‘One month after surgery we could see Ella was deteriorating,’ Claire says. ‘Every time she walked her legs were clicking. She was in pain, but when we went back to see Jabbar he sat in his chair with his hands behind his head and said: “If I’m not worried, you shouldn’t worry.” He was so arrogant.’
As months passed, Jabbar failed to respond to requests for follow-up appointments and, in desperation, Claire and husband Chris sought a second opinion from GOSH consultant orthopaedic surgeon Sarah McMahon – who would go on to raise the alarm about Jabbar – and who conducted the surgery that followed, breaking Ella’s knees and hips to make her legs straight again.
‘If we had met Sarah McMahon in 2020 she could have had that work then,’ Claire says.
It is an ‘if only’ shared by so many of Jabbar’s former patients and their families.
In Great Yarmouth, meanwhile, 19-year-old James Wood has also been left with a legacy of trauma.
Born with a rare condition limiting movement in his legs, he was just 12 when he had surgery, including Achilles tendon lengthening, intended to help him walk – but which instead triggered a cascade of horror.
A metal frame fixed to his leg went catastrophically wrong, puncturing his femoral artery.
Ella, now 16, was born with a rare congenital disorder affecting multiple systems, including her bones. Her mother says: ‘One month after surgery we could see she was deteriorating’
James Wood was just 12 when he had surgery, including Achilles tendon lengthening, intended to help him walk – but which instead triggered a cascade of horror
Within weeks, he was in extreme pain, his thigh swelling with internal bleeding. An ultrasound identified a large collection of fluid and a biopsy was performed. Medics discovered that one of the pins used to secure the frame had protruded into his thigh.
When it was removed, there was lots of bleeding and surgeons noted damage to his femoral artery. The frame was then removed and James was placed in a full-length cast to support his leg, developing a pressure sore so severe that when it was removed, the back of his heel was ‘rotten’, scraped raw by the cast’s tightness. Walking became agony.
Now a university student, he still cannot fully bend his leg. His feet are permanently misshapen and trauma has driven him to refuse further surgery, while the discovery that he is one of a legion of patients to have suffered unnecessarily at Jabbar’s hands has been profound.
‘To find out my surgeon was harming not just me but many others, and was not stopped for years, is abysmal,’ he says.
Perhaps as shocking as the injuries themselves is the extent to which parental concerns were ignored: by 2021 Dean Stalham and other parents had complained to GOSH, by which point Rob Hill, a highly respected surgeon with three decades at the hospital, had also raised an alarm.
Hill contacted the hospital’s then head of service in early 2020 after learning a family believed they had been misled by Jabbar about surgery performed on their child’s elbow. He cited concerns about Jabbar’s honesty, integrity and his tendency to work in isolation, and was asked to submit a report, which he did in June 2020.
Astonishingly it took another two years for senior managers to act: only in June 2022 did decisive action follow, after Sarah McMahon raised the alarm while overseeing Jabbar’s patients during his absence following a motorbike accident.
This time, GOSH commissioned a Royal College of Surgeons review in September 2022 – though it was kept under wraps. The following month Jabbar started an unpaid sabbatical. The RCS concluded its findings just over a year later (by which time Jabbar had left both the hospital and the UK) yet the review was not publicly acknowledged until September 2024.
Among the damning findings of the 100-page report were that Jabbar had altered clinical records after surgery and that managers had failed to act on whistleblowers’ concerns.
Many of those affected, of course, have known that desperate truth for some time and are now left to live with consequences which have been little eased by this week’s independent report.
As Georgina Wade, a solicitor at Tees Law representing several families in a civil action against GOSH, told the Daily Mail: ‘The effects have been far more profound than the report suggests, both physically and emotionally.
‘Many of these children already had complex, life-limiting conditions but they were made worse, sometimes to the point that injuries can no longer be fixed. Some children, now adults, have developed phobias of hospitals and refuse further surgery because they cannot face going through it again.’
Her words are echoed by Caroline Murgatroyd, who believes that this week’s report does ‘not go far enough in terms of accountability. We’re supporting young people who feel their childhoods were ruined by constant hospital visits and operations,’ she says.
‘To discover they were actually harmed is devastating. The psychological damage – the nightmares, the trauma – has barely been acknowledged.
‘The impact on parents is also enormous. Many blame themselves for trusting the hospital and Mr Jabbar. They shouldn’t. It was the system that failed them.’
Whether the matter becomes criminal remains to be seen. Last night a Metropolitan Police spokesperson told the Daily Mail: ‘We are in contact with Great Ormond Street Hospital and will review the report to assess whether police involvement is required.’
Whatever the outcome, little will mitigate the pain of the families whose paths crossed with Jabbar.
‘I feel I let her down,’ says Dean of daughter Bunty, now turning 13 and living with a prosthetic limb and a permanent limp. ‘As a parent, your heart breaks when you feel you haven’t done enough.’
For Claire Osborne, meanwhile, what she and others have been through raises troubling questions about the trust we place in the medical profession.
‘Every time you sign that piece of paper to allow your child to go under the knife you are putting their life into the hands of someone else,’ she says.
‘Now because of what has happened we have to think that every time we sign that piece of paper we are risking their lives further and opening them up to damage. How do we ever trust someone again?’
Additional reporting: Stephanie Condron