AN aerospace worker has been awarded £20,000 in compensation after suffering excruciating pain when his dentists failed to treat decay and extract his tooth properly.

Edward Walsh was awarded the money in an out of court settlement after taking legal action over treatment he received at Park House Dental Practice between 2014 and 2017.

The three dentists involved no longer work at the practice.

Park House Dental Practice has also been under new ownership since July 2017, with the new owners having no connection to this case. 

Mr Walsh, 51, from Accrington, also lost a tooth and was left with permanent nerve damage after one of his dentists failed to spot and treat decay in a gold tooth, and two other dentists were unable to properly extract the tooth.

He said: “I’d been visiting Park House Dental Practice regularly since 2012 and the dentists I saw always led me to believe my teeth were in good health, so I thought everything was fine.

“In 2014 I was suffering from toothache and made an appointment with Dr Jonathan Lam who said I needed a scale and polish. I let him go-ahead, thinking that would be the end of it.”

When the pain did not subside, Mr Walsh returned to the practice in 2015, where he was told by Dr Sara Mala one of his teeth, which had a gold crown, was actually decaying.

Mr Walsh said: “She didn’t seem overly concerned or do anything to treat it so I just trusted she knew what she was doing.”

However, still suffering from pains, Mr Walsh went back to his dentist again in early 2016, and was told the gold tooth would need to be extracted.

He added: “It seemed strange as they hadn’t treated the decay in 2015, and a few months later I was in Dr Mala’s chair waiting to have the tooth extracted.

“She was struggling with the extraction as she was pulling and pulling and ended up snapping off the crown but not the rest of the tooth.”

Mr Walsh said Dr Phillip Gale was then asked to assist and claims he began ‘yanking at his tooth’.

He said: “He walked in, didn’t even say hello, and started yanking at my tooth with extreme force. I thought my jaw was going to snap.”

Mr Walsh said over the following weeks his face swelled and the pain in his tooth socket became excruciating. He later discovered the tooth had not been properly removed, meaning it had to be surgically extracted.

This left him with damaged nerves and a constant burning pain that has affected his speech, how he eats and drinks, and even how he shaves.

He added: “I can’t even kiss my wife because of the numbness.”

In 2017, Mr Walsh’s case was taken on by the Dental Law Partnership and upon analysis of his dental records, they found Dr Lam had failed to spot and treat decay at Mr Walsh’s tooth, which had been clearly visible in X-rays.

Had this been spotted, the tooth could have been restored and would never have needed to be extracted.

Mr Walsh was finally awarded £20,000 in an out of court settlement earlier this year, although the dentists did not admit liability.

The new owners of Park House Dental Practice refused to comment on the grounds that they did not operate the dental surgery at the time this case was opened.