A MEDICAL Council fitness-to-practise inquiry is expected to deliver its decision in a case against a consultant whose 2½-year-old patient had an unnecessary tongue-tie operation.
Prof Martin Corbally, who was a paediatric surgeon at Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital in Crumlin when the incident happened in 2010, faced four allegations of poor professional performance at the inquiry.
In April 2010, Baby X from Co Meath had a tongue tie operation, a lingual frenulectomy releasing the fold of skin beneath her tongue when what she needed was an upper labial frenulectomy, to release the fold of skin attaching her upper lip to her gum.
Prof Corbally had delegated the procedure to a registrar.
The allegations against Prof Corbally, now chief of staff at King Hamad University Hospital in Bahrain, included that he incorrectly described the procedure needed by the child on her notes and delegated the procedure to a junior without adequate communication.
Summing up yesterday Eileen Barrington SC, for Prof Corbally, said it was “completely inappropriate to suggest” an error her client made in the notes of Baby X amounted to poor professional performance. His error would have been obvious to anyone reading it, she said as it described a procedure that did not exist.
She said her client’s “slip of the pen” was not the cause of the wrong procedure being carried out. It was the incorrect description on the theatre list made by an unknown administrator that caused the error.
