YORK District Hospital has apologised to cancer victim Gail Hepworth over a doctor's mistaken prescription of a drug.

General manager Colin Watts says the drug, Arimidex, was not prescribed according to the recommended guidelines, and he would like to offer the York Health Trust's apologies.

The Evening Press reported earlier this year how Gail - who underwent complementary therapy in America last autumn in a bid to live to see her children grow up - had lodged a formal complaint over her treatment within the NHS.

The 40-year-old mother-of-two from Hemingbrough, near Selby, had discovered that Arimidex was not licensed for use by pre-menopausal women or by patients with certain liver disorders. The manufacturers told her it was ineffective if given to pre-menopausal women. She said she was pre-menopausal and had also had liver function problems for some time.

Gail wrote to Mr Watts to outline why she believed she had received "poor and unsatisfactory" care and to suggest that in future, other patients could benefit from a blood test to establish menopausal status before being prescribed the drug.

Mr Watts says now that during a "relatively fraught consultation" in January, the doctor accepted he had missed the significance of Gail's statement that her periods had returned. "This should have led to a re-evaluation of hormonal status but this was not done, and the doctor recognises this was an error on his part."

Gail's husband, David, said: "She is just pleased to have had an apology. That was all she ever wanted."

He said Gail, whose condition improved dramatically after her treatment at the Schachter Centre in New York last autumn in a trip which Evening Press readers helped to fund, had discovered through recent tests that Arimidex was exacerbating her liver function problems.

But she was continuing to control her pain without any morphine, using only over-the-counter painkillers.

picture: Gail Hepworth