Patients’ rights advocate Alex Lam says such cases should also be proactively escalated to professional watchdogs for investigation
A recent surgical blunder involving a doctor removing a woman’s Fallopian tube rather than her appendix has cast doubt on Hong Kong public hospitals’ ability to effectively implement safety protocols and allocate manpower, patients’ advocates have said.
Caritas Medical Centre in Sham Shui Po on Friday revealed the blunder, which involved a 48-year-old woman who was admitted with appendicitis on June 17.
A higher surgical trainee performed a laparoscopic appendectomy on the patient the next day but wrongly removed her Fallopian tube after misidentifying the organ, an error attributed to “tissue adhesion near the surgical site”, according to the public hospital.
The mistake was only discovered five days later, a Monday, after the patient’s condition failed to improve and a pathology report on Wednesday confirmed that the wrong organ had been excised, forcing her to undergo a second operation.
The hospital apologised for the incident and told its surgery department to review its staffing deployment, supervision and coaching, among other aspects.
Alex Lam Chi-yau, chairman of advocacy group Hong Kong Patients’ Voices, described the incident as “extremely serious” and a throwback to another case in March last year in which a woman’s uterus was wrongly removed due to mishandled lab samples.
The Hospital Authority said in March that it would adopt six measures after a series of medical blunders last year. They included building a database to log patients’ post-operation wounds.
