UK: Octogenarian doctor imprisoned after patient's death

An octogenarian doctor, already suspended in the UK for lying about his age, was sentenced on Tuesday July 5 to three years in prison after admitting responsibility for the death of a patient following a botched diagnosis.

Isyaka Mamman, 85 and born in Nigeria, had already made two similar mistakes before the death of one of his patients in September 2018. According to his colleagues, he should have been retired years ago.

In Manchester court, the doctor admitted to the negligent manslaughter of Shahida Parveen, a 48-year-old mother of three.

Isyaka Mamman allegedly used the wrong needle in the wrong place during a bone marrow harvest, when the needle hit the heart and caused severe internal bleeding.

“Why you were allowed to continue working”

Judge Amanda Yip sentenced him to three years in prison and called the case "

" because of past mistakes by the doctor and lingering doubts about his age.

"

."

"

," Amanda Yip said.

Became a doctor in Nigeria in 1965, Isyaka Mamman started in the NHS, the British public health service, in 1991 but his "

" is subject to "

" due to the absence of a birth certificate, estimated the tribunal.

During his training, he claimed to have been born in 1936 but told the NHS that he had been born in 1941. In 2001, as he approached the mandatory retirement age then set at 65, he gave a new year of birth, 1947, which he used in an application for naturalization to become a British citizen.

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The regulator of the Order of Physicians had suspended him for 12 months in 2004 for having lied about his age, because if he had been born in 1947, that would have meant that he would have started his medical studies at the age of 10 years...