KEY POINTS:
The partner of a 57-year-old man who died from complications of heart treatment at Auckland City Hospital claims the hospital did not contact the family afterwards to see how they were coping.
After Barrie Williams died, his partner Fiona Pienaar watched his friends and family struggle to keep their lives together.
Mr Williams died in June 2006 at Auckland City Hospital after a procedure to treat the abnormal rhythm of his heart went tragically wrong.
The back of his heart was inadvertently pierced by an instrument at the end of a tiny tube inserted through a blood vessel from the groin.
Open-heart surgery was performed to fix the hole, but Mr Williams later died of a lack of oxygen.
"It was a nightmare," Ms Pienaar said yesterday, after the release on Wednesday of the first national statistics on major treatment errors at public hospitals.
The Quality Improvement Committee counted 182 preventable "serious and sentinel events" in the last financial year, including 40 deaths.
Mr Williams' treatment is not reported on the Auckland District Health Board's serious or sentinel list: it was considered a tragic but well-recognised complication of treatment done appropriately, rather than an error.
Ms Pienaar, a counsellor, of Westmere, had been with Mr Williams, a financial adviser, for three years and was engaged to him.
"He was due to give his youngest daughter away. She had to get married without him," Ms Pienaar said yesterday.
"The experience of watching him on life support for three days, only to watch him die after managing a few small breaths after the machines were turned off, will haunt me forever."
She said the hospital did not contact anyone in the family to see how they were coping, provide leaflets on how to cope with grief, "or make any contact with us whatsoever.
"The day we walked out of the intensive care heart unit and the security door snapped shut behind us was the last we saw or heard from anyone attached to the hospital.
"Subsequently we asked for a meeting with the surgeons concerned and I acknowledge that they were deeply affected by the outcome ... "
But the hospital had provided no information about any review of Mr Williams' case.
"It should be your right to know what has changed as a result of your huge loss [and] what changes the surgeons and their teams have made to their practice ...
"I watched family and friends struggle incredibly with their mental health. It's a reflection on their strength that they survived, rather than any help they got from the Auckland District Health Board."
But a senior manager at the hospital, Kay Hyman, said it had approached the family.
"We have made efforts to speak with Mr Williams' family since his death but we have not been successful in managing to find a date which suited all members of the family. We continue to be happy to meet with Ms Pienaar at her convenience."
She said Mr Williams was a high-risk case and he understood and accepted the risks of the procedure.
A review by accident compensation officials had found the hospital's management plan for him was reasonable.
