A military hospital in Pingtung City has been accused of leaving a surgical scalpel blade inside the chest cavity of a 72-year-old woman, which resulted in her death.
“We demand that the judiciary conduct an investigation. The family has asked for answers from the military hospital,” Pingtung County Councilor Hsu Chan-wei (許展維) said on Monday, accusing doctors and staff at the Pingtung Branch of Kaohsiung Armed Forces General Hospital of gross negligence and misconduct.
A granddaughter of the 72-year-old, a high-school student surnamed Huang (黃), said her grandmother had serious coughing and discomfort on the evening of July 1, and she called for an ambulance.
After taking a blood sample and taking an X-ray image, hospital medics said that she had pleural effusion, a buildup of excess fluid between the layers of the pleura outside the lungs.
However, the woman had to wait a few days for treatment, since it was a Friday and the hospital could not perform the operation at the weekend due to a shortage of staff, Huang said.
“My grandmother was there until Tuesday, when doctors decided it was necessary to operate, but later that afternoon, hospital staff told us a blade from a surgical scalpel had snapped off and they could not get it out,” Huang said. “Then they said she needed to be transferred to the main military hospital in Kaohsiung for the procedure.”
“The staff told us that a bed for my grandmother had been arranged at the Kaohsiung hospital. So my family had to transport her that evening, from Pingtung to Kaohsiung, and we paid NT$3,500 for the ambulance, but there was no bed when we got there and so we had to wait. My grandmother was in pain all this time,” she said.
Huang said they waited for two days, until the morning of Thursday last week, for the operation to remove the blade.
“In next two days, July 8 and 9, we could still talk to her via videoconference ... but the next day [Sunday] a medic called us to say that her condition had deteriorated, and not long after they said that she died,” Huang said. “We could not believe what had happened.”
The Pingtung District Prosecutors’ Office said it had asked the coroner to perform a postmortem and that, based on the findings, it could initiate legal proceedings.
Additional reporting by Jason Pan
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