NATIONAL: Surgeon who branded his initials on patients' livers fined £10,000

Simon Bramhall, 53, used an argon beam machine to ‘write’ his initials on the organs of two anaesthetised victims in February and August 2013 while working at Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital.

A judge at the city’s Crown Court said Bramhall, who resigned from the hospital in 2014, had carried out ‘an abuse of power and a betrayal of trust’.

The consultant, who was given a formal warning by the General Medical Council (GMC) last February, admitted two counts of assault by beating last month after prosecutors accepted his not guilty pleas to charges of assault occasioning actual bodily harm.

Judge Paul Farrer QC also sentenced Bramhall on Friday to a 12-month community order with 120 hours of unpaid work.

He said: ‘Both of the (transplant) operations were long and difficult. I accept that on both occasions you were tired and stressed and I accept that this may have affected your judgment. This was conduct born of professional arrogance of such magnitude that it strayed into criminal behaviour.

‘What you did was an abuse of power and a betrayal of trust that these patients had invested in you.

‘I accept that you didn’t intend or foresee anything but the most trivial of harm would be caused.’

One of the victims, referred to in court as Patient A, received a donor organ in 2013 in a life-saving operation carried out by Bramhall.

But the donor liver failed around a week later - for reasons unconnected to its implantation - and another surgeon spotted Bramhall’s initials on the organ.

A photograph of the 4cm-high branding was taken on a mobile phone and Bramhall, who now works for the NHS in Herefordshire, later admitted using the argon beam coagulator to mark Patient A’s liver.