Bowel Cancer Negligence: Why Early Detection Matters

When delays or mistakes in diagnosing bowel cancer occur, the consequences can be devastating. If this happens due to medical error, you may be entitled to take legal action.

In this blog, we look at what bowel cancer negligence is and what your legal options are if you or a loved one has been affected.

Understanding bowel cancer

Bowel cancer, sometimes referred to as colorectal cancer, can occur anywhere within the large bowel, including the colon and rectum. It’s one of the most common types of cancer in the UK.

Almost 44,000 people in the UK are diagnosed with bowel cancer every year and the majority (94%) are over 50. However, bowel cancer can affect someone at any age.

Most bowel cancers develop from polyps, benign small growths on the lining of the large intestine or rectum. Polyps are usually harmless and non-cancerous though, in a small number of cases, a polyp can become cancerous over a period of years.

Bowel cancer screening can help find polyps that are more likely to develop into bowel cancer. When screening, if your doctor finds any polyps, they can remove these straight away to lower the risk of bowel cancer. They should then arrange surveillance to monitor the site.

Common symptoms of bowel cancer:

• Bleeding from your bottom
• Blood in your poo
• A change in bowel habits – going less or more often, frequent diarrhoea or constipation
• Unexplained weight loss
• Unexplained tiredness
• A pain or lump in your stomach

Having these symptoms doesn’t mean you definitely have bowel cancer, but it’s always important to speak to your GP to rule it out.

Importance of early diagnosis

Early detection is still the most critical factor in beating bowel cancer. Nine in ten people will survive bowel cancer for five years or more if they are diagnosed at the earliest stage, when the cancer hasn’t spread outside the bowel wall. This falls to one in ten if diagnosed at the most advanced stage, when the cancer has spread to other parts of the body like the liver or lungs.

More than 16,800 people die from bowel cancer in the UK every year. The number of people dying of bowel cancer has been falling since the 1970s thanks to better treatment options and the success of the national bowel cancer screening programme.

Earlier this year, the minimum age for bowel screening was lowered from 60 to 50. Extending the age range for the at-home FIT test is a welcomed advancement that will save so many lives. Around 5,000 people are diagnosed with bowel cancer aged 50 to 59 and just over 1,300 die from the disease in this age group.

Screening is the best way to diagnose bowel cancer early, when it's treatable and curable. However, there are still ongoing issues within the health service that are impacting the rate of early diagnosis. Thousands of people are waiting for tests like colonoscopies to diagnose bowel cancer due to staff shortages and an increase in demand for tests.

Half of hospitals are in breach of waiting time targets for urgent diagnostic test. This is leaving so many people in limbo, not knowing whether they do have cancer and whether it is spreading while they wait for a diagnosis.   

Time is everything in cancer treatment. The earlier bowel cancer is detected, the better the outcome.

Delayed diagnosis of bowel cancer can lead to:

• More invasive treatment (e.g. major surgery or chemotherapy)
• Long-term side effects or permanent disability
• Lower survival rates
• Significant emotional and financial stress

When such delays are the result of negligence, the law gives you the right to seek compensation.

What is bowel cancer negligence?

Medical negligence occurs when a healthcare professional fails to provide the standard of care expected in their role, resulting in harm to the patient.

In the context of bowel cancer, this might include:

• Failing to investigate early symptoms like bleeding from the bottom, persistent abdominal pain, or changes in bowel habits
• Delays in referring patients for further testing such as colonoscopies or CT scans
• Misinterpreting test results, or not acting on abnormal findings
• Ignoring or not following up on patient concerns, especially in those with known risk factors (e.g. family history, age over 50)
• Failing to excise polyps or excise them fully.

These failures can lead to a delayed diagnosis, meaning the cancer may progress to a more advanced and less treatable stage.

Late diagnosis of bowel cancer can deprive a patient of the opportunity to have less invasive treatment like keyhole surgery rather than ‘open’ surgery to the abdomen. Open surgery puts the patient at risk of more complications like hernias and wound infection, more visible scarring and a longer recovery time.

Some patients need surgery. Colectomy is a surgical procedure to remove all or part of your colon. Your colon, part of your large intestine, is a long tubelike organ at the end of your digestive tract. If a colectomy is performed to remove the cancerous parts of the colon, some people will need to have a stoma, either temporarily or permanently.

Chemotherapy may also be required if the cancer has spread to the lymph nodes or there is a high risk of it spreading to other parts of the body.

In other cases, delayed diagnosis of bowel cancer can mean the tumour blocks the bowel, stopping bowel movements from passing through. Known as bowel obstruction, patients can be left in severe pain with bloating, vomiting and a risk of sepsis. Surgery is usually required to remove the obstruction or part of the bowel.

Real-life cases of bowel cancer negligence

Here at Medical Solicitors, we have supported various clients to make a compensation claim for bowel cancer negligence. The cases vary, with some experiencing delayed diagnosis and others having substandard care relating to bowel cancer.

These are just some of the cases we have settled.

• £850,000 compensation to a 36-year-old man who experienced a delay in diagnosing a cancerous polyp in his rectum. This client was just 25 when he first attended the hospital colorectal department with bleeding from his bottom and painful defecation. Over the next four years he went back to hospital a further 12 times before he was diagnosed with rectal cancer. Due to the four-year delay, he needed invasive surgery with a stoma, 12 cycles of chemotherapy and was left with multiple ongoing symptoms including incontinence and erectile dysfunction which severely impacted his life.
• £446,000 compensation for a 52-year-old man who was advised to have the wrong type of surgery to treat suspected bowel cancer. The man, who had a history of ulcerative colitis, had parts of his colon removed which caused leakage in the surgical area, resulting in a stay in intensive care with sepsis and organ failure. Thankfully, he recovered but was left with a permanent stoma and had to medically retire. In this case, he should have had more extensive surgery to remove the large bowel, colon, rectum and upper anal cancer which would have avoided all complications that happened.
• £260,000 compensation for a 57-year-old man who had a total colectomy after a pre-cancerous polyp was not removed. He had a few years of pain and suffering before undergoing a repeat colonoscopy and was then told that the polyp should have been removed five years previously. He had major surgery to remove his bowel as the polyp had turned into cancer and spread throughout the bowel. Fortunately for him, his lymph nodes were clear. However, removal of the bowel has life-long implications for him.
• £30,000 compensation for the estate of an 81-year-old man who died from errors to surgically remove a bowel obstruction caused by a sigmoid tumour. He has been diagnosed with invasive metastatic bowel cancer over a year before the surgery. After attending hospital with abdominal pain and vomiting a brown substance, tests confirmed the tumour was blocking the bowel. Following a failed attempt to insert a colorectal stent, the man had a keyhole loop colostomy with a stoma. However, surgeons wrongly pulled out the distal end of the bowel instead of the proximal. The stoma wasn’t working, leading to vomiting, bloating, and sepsis. He underwent more surgery to fix the mistake, but sadly his condition deteriorated and he died the following day.
• £20,000 compensation for the estate of an 83-year-old man who died after a surgical swab was left in his body for 20 months after bowel obstruction removal. The bowel obstruction was caused by a tumour and he underwent a Hartmann's procedure to remove part of the diseased bowel, during which a swab was left inside him. He had many follow-up appointments, CT scans and even a barium swallow to examine the gastrointestinal tract over a period of almost two years. Images from these tests showed the swab but there was a negligent failure to pick up on and report on this. The swab was eventually surgically removed but the man developed respiratory failure and sadly died.
• £9,000 compensation for the estate of a 77-year-old man with terminal bowel cancer who had substandard management of a hospice acquired pressure sore. He went into hospice for symptom management during palliative chemotherapy but there were multiple failures to regularly check for pressure sores or refer for tissue viability despite evidence of redness and blanching to the base of his spine. This discomfort and pain from the pressure sore caused him more suffering than the cancer. By the time he died, ten weeks after being admitted to hospice, the large grade 4 pressure sore still hadn’t healed.  

Do I have a bowel cancer negligence claim?

Being diagnosed with bowel cancer can be life-changing. Added to this, realising it could have been detected earlier, perhaps even cured, can cause an entirely different additional layer of pain.

If you believe medical negligence played a role, you have every right to seek answers, accountability, and justice. Legal action can’t change what happened, but it can help secure financial stability and ensure other people don’t suffer the same fate.

To make a successful medical negligence claim, you need to prove three things:

1. Duty of Care – The healthcare provider had a legal obligation to care for you
2. Breach of Duty – They failed to meet the standard expected of them
3. Causation – Their failure directly caused you harm, such as a worsened condition or reduced life expectancy

If you believe you were a victim of negligent bowel cancer treatment, our team of medical negligence solicitors can review your case and advise you.

We offer free no obligation consultations where our team will take some details from you. The initial investigation includes requesting your medical records to understand what was (or wasn’t) done. Our solicitors may also suggest making an official complaint against the healthcare provider in question, if you haven’t already done so.

We also have an expert team of oncologists and gastroenterologists/upper GI surgeons on-hand who we call upon to give their opinion on whether negligent mistakes were made in your care.

If, after we have conducted our initial research, we feel you have a strong case of success, we can offer you a no win, no fee agreement. This means you won’t pay any legal fees upfront. If your case is successful, then we try and recover all our costs from the other side.

What does compensation for bowel cancer cover?

If your claim is successful, compensation may cover:

• General damages for your pain, suffering and loss of amenity
• Loss of income or employment
• Medical treatment and rehabilitation costs
• Travel and care expenses
• Psychological impact (e.g. anxiety, depression)

Each case is unique, and a solicitor will help assess the full impact on your life. This enables us to make an accurate valuation of the financial cost of the negligence. Our helpful compensation guide has more information about damages.