'Dr Death' altered patients' charts, inquiry told
A surgeon branded Dr Death by his colleagues in a rural Australian hospital regularly altered his patients’ charts to remove references of post-surgery complications, a senior nurse told an inquiry.
Dr Jayant Patel is the subject of a royal commission in Queensland state after he was linked to the deaths of 87 patients he treated in two years as a surgeon at Bundaberg Base Hospital.
Intensive care nurse Toni Hoffman, the whistleblower whose revelations sparked the Patel inquiry, said because the doctor regularly changed his patients’ charts, the documentation couldn’t be relied upon to be accurate.
“We had to carefully look through these charts and marry each little piece up to the other, and that went for everything, including the pathology reporting, coding and death certificates,” she said.
Patel left Australia earlier this year and is not at the inquiry. He is believed to be in Portland, Oregon.
Medical records in the US show Patel has a 20-year history of botched operations and has been cited by medical boards for negligence in both Oregon and New York states.
Hoffman told the inquiry, which is being held in a lecture theatre in a Bundaberg college, that when staff raised concerns about the higher-than-average incidence of problems such as wound dehiscence – the unravelling of surgical scars – Patel would laugh at them and tell them to look up its meaning in a dictionary.
“He said to us that we had to look up the definition of wound dehiscence, because a superficial wound breakdown wasn’t a wound dehiscence,” she said. “He had a different definition of wound dehiscence than what we did.”
After two weeks of testimony and before its conclusion, the inquiry’s head, Tony Morris, recommended police charge Patel, who was born in India and is now a US citizen, with murder over the death of one patient.
A team of detectives is trawling through Patel’s records, but has yet to file any charges.
