As the city faces a new medical mistake, we look at similar issues since shortly after the handover
ALAN YU ALAN.YU@SCMP.COM
PUBLISHED : Wednesday, 22 July, 2015, 3:38pm
UPDATED : Wednesday, 22 July, 2015, 3:58pm
Tha latest blunder took place at Tuen Mun Hospital, where operators of a liver-testing machine apparently misread some of the data it collected. Photo: K.Y. Cheng
A mistake at Tuen Mun Hospital involving a machine that analyzes liver enzymes has affected some 4,000 mostly elderly patients. It won’t be the first large scale-medical blunder in Hong Kong though.
What follows is a brief summary of some of the higher-profile medical mistakes and blunders seen in the city since shortly after the handover.
In 1998, two people were wrongly injected with undiluted potassium chloride, a drug that’s given in large doses to stop the heart during executions by lethal injection. Those cases happened within two weeks of each other. An 89-year-old man died, and a baby boy lived.
According to pharmacologist and medical writer David Kroll in Forbes, “if given alone without the other drugs (used in lethal injection) the high concentration of potassium chloride would be terribly painful, akin to fire or electricity coursing through the veins.”
There were 519 medical errors in the first six months of 1998. At the time, a Hospital Authority spokesman said that hospitals had started a programme to report incidents and monitor medical quality.
Jump forward to 2003, the year of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) outbreak in Hong Kong. More than 80 people were misdiagnosed with Sars and given a steroid treatment that’s normally given to patients with serious bone degeneration. This all came out when senior Hospital Authority official Daisy Dai Siu-kwan went before the Legislative Council’s health services panel in November 2003.
The government expanded compensation to include those misdiagnosed with Sars. Photo: Robert Ng
That year, the Health, Welfare and Food Bureau (now the Food and Health Bureau) expanded the scope of a HK$155 million fund to include the side effects of people who were misdiagnosed with Sars and suffered from side effects. Previously, that fund only covered Sars patients who suffered from side effects of the treatment and the families of people who died from Sars.
Then in 2011, a university student sued the authoritybecause a doctor accidently made a hole in his heart when he was a baby, and the mistake wasn’t fixed until 12 years later. The court was told that it left the boy with a weak body and the fitness of a 50-year-old man, when he should have been at the prime of his youth. The student won HK$1.3 million.
During the first few months of last year, a record seven people had objects left inside their bodies after medical procedures. The objects included a 12cm drainage tube, a 4.5cm catheter tip left in a kidney, a 1cm drill bit that snapped off and the tip of a metal electrode left embedded in the head of a newborn baby.
In August last year, United Christian Hospital announced it was investigating a pathologist who made mistakes in the reports of 118 people, leading to 17 getting the wrong treatment and some cancer cells being missed.
United Christian Hospital consultant pathologist Leung Chung-ying told reporters of the mistakes in the reports. Photo: Nora Tam
The following month, in an unrelated incident, a 92-year-old woman died after a feeding tube was put in her lung instead of her stomach.
As reported in January, the number of serious medical incidents last year jumped to a new high of 49. There were 26 in 2013 and 34 in 2012. An amount of 49 cases makes it the highest since the Hospital Authority started writing reports on medical incidents in 2008.
In 2012, after the number of serious medical mistakes increased by a third, Dr Kwok Ka-ki, convenor of the concern group Caring Hong Kong and a former medical sector legislator, said the problem lay with the Hospital Authority.
“The poor management culture in the organisation has been a long-term problem,” he told Legco at the time.
“The staff have little work satisfaction and morale is low. This directly affects the quality of service.”
The mistakes were compounded by staff shortages, lawmakers heard.
The Hospital Authority’s director of hospital groups, Dr Cheung Wai-lun, said staffing would remain a problem over the next three years. He estimated there would be a net increase of 50 to 60 doctors each year, but there were about 200 vacancies at the time.
Relief measures include the recruitment of retired and part-time doctors from the private sector and hiring from overseas, he said.
Cheung Tak-hai, vice-chairman of the Alliance for Patients’ Mutual Help Organisations, said many patients worried about the quality of service and mistakes at public hospitals, but they had no choice because private hospitals were too expensive.
As of March 2015, public hospitals were still short some 250 doctors, as medical school graduates opted for more lucrative jobs in private clinics. A study from the University of Hong Kong showed that the chronic shortage of doctors would not start to ease until 2020. But Secretary for Food and Health Dr Ko Wing-man said the government may increase the number of openings in the city’s two medical schools. As of 2012, that number was capped at 420 a year.
The scheme to recruit foreign doctors to work at public hospitals made the news again in October: Three of the 11 specialists who came to Hong Kong as part of it had decided to leave, saying that all the red tape over licensing (which includes a three-part exam and a 12-month internship) didn't make sense for people who are already specialists in their fields.
http://m.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/1842772/brief-history-hong-kongs-medical-blunders
