IT WAS “a great pity” the parents of a child weren’t properly listened to when they asked staff at Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin, Dublin, to double check which kidney their son was to have removed, the child’s consultant surgeon said yesterday.
Prof Martin Corbally told a Medical Council fitness-to-practise inquiry that he, his surgical team and the hospital had “failed” the child and his family after the wrong kidney was removed in March 2008. The boy was left with a 9 per cent functioning right kidney.
He said it was only after the operation – which he had delegated to junior doctor Sri Paran – he realised the parents had raised concerns beforehand. This “amazed” him as these concerns had not been brought to his attention, he said. He added that when he saw the now eight-year-old boy in outpatients in January 2008, he told his parents the child had to have his right kidney removed but erroneously recorded in the medical notes he needed the left one removed.
“I may have been distracted . . . and got the side wrong,” he said, adding it was a very busy clinic and he worked 75-80 hours a week, not including emergency call-out. “I feel I made a human error in booking the patient for wrong-side surgery.”
He said the child’s X-ray report was not available to him in outpatients when he saw the child and management had been warned months before that “a crisis was waiting to happen” as a result of delays filing hard copies of X-ray reports.
He said this was a still a significant issue for the hospital to deal with and there were 18,000 unfiled X-ray reports and letters in the hospital in February this year.
Nobody looked at the child’s X-rays until after the wrong kidney was removed, he confirmed, but he said he felt it was up to the operating surgeon, Dr Paran, to review them before commencing surgery. The X-rays were in the theatre.
Prof Corbally entered the theatre about 45 minutes into the operation and noticed more blood than normal and that the kidney being removed looked healthy.
When he looked at the X-rays, it was immediately obvious the wrong kidney had been taken out and it could not be re-implanted.
He went to meet the boy’s parents, Jennifer Stewart and Oliver Conroy, and apologised profusely. “They were absolutely devastated and distraught by the news,” he said.
Prof Corbally and Dr Paran are before the inquiry facing allegations of professional misconduct.