Nurses hid patients from Doctor Death

SYDNEY - His own colleagues called him "Doctor Death", and nurses were so alarmed by Dr Jayant Patel's surgical blunders that they hid patients from him as he walked the wards.

But warnings about Patel, linked with the deaths of 87 patients at an Australian hospital, went unheeded for two years. As the allegations of lethal ineptitude mounted, health authorities helped the Indian-born surgeon to flee the country, buying him a one-way business-class ticket to the United States.

Horror stories about Patel's tour of duty at Queensland's Bundaberg Base Hospital have emerged at a public inquiry in Brisbane, which heard that he amputated the leg of a diabetic Aboriginal woman and then "forgot about her". When she was discovered six days later, she was semi-comatose and the stump of her leg was gangrenous.

Patel, 55, was recruited in 2003 and promoted to be the hospital's director of surgery, despite a record of disciplinary action against him in the US. In New York his licence was revoked in 2001 because of gross negligence. The inquiry heard that Queensland health authorities never checked his qualifications. Staff claim he repeatedly punctured vital organs and tampered with patient notes to conceal his incompetence.

The hospital's director of medicine, Dr Peter Miach, allegedly saw him do coronary surgery on a man who was "moaning and screaming" because he was not anaesthetised.

Toni Hoffman, a nurse who blew the whistle on Patel, said patient after patient died of complications after having unnecessary or inappropriate procedures.

One man died of internal bleeding after Patel stabbed him 50 times with a needle in an attempt to drain fluid from a sac around his heart. A scan had shown that there was no fluid there, Hoffman said, but "he decided he was going to do it anyway". When Hoffman raised her concerns with administrators, they accused her of a personality clash.

- INDEPENDENT