Appendicitis surgery blunder puts spotlight on Hong Kong public hospital safety

A recent surgical blunder involving a doctor mistakenly removing a patient’s fallopian tube instead of her appendix has cast doubt on Hong Kong public hospitals’ ability to effectively implement safety protocols and allocate manpower, advocates have said.

Caritas Medical Centre revealed the blunder on Friday, which began with a 48-year-old woman being admitted for appendicitis on June 17.

A higher surgical trainee performed a laparoscopic appendectomy on the patient the next day but wrongly removed her fallopian tube after misidentifying the organ, an error attributed to “tissue adhesion near the surgical site”, according to the public hospital.

The mistake was only discovered five days later, on Monday, after the patient’s condition failed to improve and a pathology report on Wednesday confirmed the wrong organ had been excised, forcing her to undergo a second operation.

The hospital apologised for the incident and requested its department of surgery to undergo a review of its staffing deployment, supervision and coaching, among other aspects.

Alex Lam Chi-yau, chairman of patient advocacy group Hong Kong Patients’ Voices, described the incident as “extremely serious” and a throwback to another case in March last year in which a woman’s uterus had been wrongly removed due to mishandled lab samples.

The Hospital Authority said in March that it would adopt six measures after a series of medical blunders last year. They included building a database to log patients’ post-operation wounds.