Patients kept in the dark on surgeon's misconduct

Patients at an Auckland hospital who are being treated by a doctor found guilty of professional misconduct are not being told he is on a Medical Council supervision programme.

"We didn't feel we had the right to do that," the surgeon in charge of the doctor said yesterday.

The names of the doctor and the hospital remain suppressed by the Health Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal.

In Christchurch on Monday the doctor pleaded guilty before the tribunal to professional misconduct, relating to complaints from three patients he treated between October 2001 and March 2003.

The tribunal ordered he be censured, supervised for two years (on top of the year he has already worked under supervision) and pay $20,000 towards the costs of the proceedings against him.

One of the complainants, a 65-year-old woman whose bowel operation went wrong in 2002, was yesterday unhappy the doctor was still allowed to operate, worrying he could harm others.

"If he's always supervised, I guess that's something - as long as he is," she said.

He had stapled through her rectum and perforated the wall of her vagina. A cancerous tumour had earlier been removed from her bowel.

"In the long haul, I've always got a [colostomy] bag and get extremely tired. I think it aged me 20 years."

Playing bowls after the operation, she felt her insides burst open.

In another case, in which a patient suffered excessive bleeding from a cut to the aorta during surgery to correct reflux, the doctor provided insufficient information and so failed to gain informed consent.

In the third case, the doctor admitted he failed to use reasonable care and skill during a laparoscopic (keyhole) appendectomy when he cut a major vein.

The surgeon in charge of the doctor said the doctor had worked at his Auckland hospital for six months.

He had no concerns for patients' safety.

"We have been quite happy with him," the surgeon said. "He's helped us out at a time when we've been short of junior doctors."

The doctor gained his first medical qualification in 1975 and his specialist surgeon's qualification in 1988. But on the supervision programme, he is working at the level of a doctor two or three years out of medical school.

The surgeon said the doctor had performed some general-anaesthetic procedures as lead surgeon with indirect supervision from a specialist, but they were only "minor operations", such as treating abscesses. For anything more serious he worked under direct supervision.

"He has not been ... left to do the sorts of operations that have been an issue in front of the Medical Council."

The tribunal denied the doctor permanent name suppression, but left interim suppression in place to allow for any High Court appeal. The doctor is likely to appeal.

Among the reasons he gave when seeking suppression were that a "white supremacist" website had published racist comments about him and there was a risk of harm to him and his family if his name was published.

The doctor's lawyer, Harry Waalkens, QC, added that revealing his name would make it hard for him to keep a job. Some of his family had already been forced to change jobs as a result of publicity.

Mr Waalkens said of the three cases: "These are the types of errors that happen in any surgical practice. But for the fact that there were three over a relatively short period of time he would have defended all of them and had a very good prospect of being acquitted."