A surgeon working in southern NSW who operated on the wrong end of a patient’s bowel contributing to their death has been banned from practising for six months.<\/p>\n
It is one of more than a dozen complaints lodged against Dr Liu-Ming Schmidt, which also included failing to identify a cancerous growth during a colonoscopy.<\/p>\n
The NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal found Dr Schmidt guilty of professional misconduct, stemming from proceedings instigated by the state’s Health Care Complaints Commission (HCCC) involving 13 patients.<\/p>\n
The tribunal heard Dr Schmidt has worked at Albury Wodonga Health, BreastScreen NSW, Tumut District Hospital and Griffith Base Hospital, over the last 17 years.<\/p>\n
It also heard that in January 2023, Dr Schmidt agreed to a condition on her registration to “not practise medicine” for a year after an incident that was the subject of one of the complaints in the HCCC’s proceedings.<\/p>\n
Errors, unacceptable oversight and insight concerns<\/p>\n
In one complaint, during a 2022 colonoscopy, Dr Schmidt failed to identify a large cancer in a patient’s colon.<\/p>\n
It was identified by another surgeon in a repeat colonoscopy three months later.<\/p>\n
In another complaint, Dr Schmidt performed emergency surgery at Albury Hospital in 2019 for a bowel obstruction.<\/p>\n
“The surgery was not successful because Dr Schmidt made a catastrophic error,” the tribunal heard.<\/p>\n
“She brought out the wrong end of the bowel when she formed [a] stoma. She caused a complete mechanical bowel obstruction so that the stoma was not capable of passing faecal material.”<\/p>\n
The patient died nearly four weeks after the surgery. A NSW coroner has previously ruled the death due to complications in part from a surgical error.<\/p>\n
The tribunal also heard Dr Schmidt failed to disclose the error to the patient.<\/p>\n
Another complaint regarding a patient with a bowel obstruction found Dr Schmidt failed to provide appropriate management and care for a patient.<\/p>\n
“Her engagement, oversight and direct involvement was unacceptable,” the tribunal ruled.<\/p>\n
During the proceedings Dr Schmidt also admitted that between 2015 and 2021, she did not take adequate time to perform or capture images of patients undergoing colonoscopies at Wodonga Hospital.<\/p>\n
She also admitted to failing to keep appropriate patient records and notes.<\/p>\n
The tribunal heard Dr Schmidt’s conduct in relation to one patient led to Safer Care Victoria recalling almost 2,000 of her colonoscopy patients, with around 1,000 undergoing a repeat procedure.<\/p>\n
The Tribunal heard Dr Schmidt was “diligent” in trying to address the areas of concern raised by the HCCC, however it noted concerns about her insight into her conduct.<\/p>\n
“Her evidence \u2026 was on occasions either inconsistent or qualified by unjustifiably blaming others” the tribunal ruled.<\/p>\n
Dr Schmidt has also been ordered to pay the HCCC’s legal costs, as well as undertake further training and supervision when the suspension on her registration lifts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A surgeon working in southern NSW who operated on the wrong end of a patient’s bowel contributing to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":55188,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[22,21,26377,52083,14003,21026,13078,52084],"class_list":["post-55187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-austrlia","tag-health-care-complaints-commission","tag-liu-ming-schmidt","tag-medical","tag-medicine","tag-nsw-civil-and-administrative-tribunal","tag-registration-cancelled"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55187\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}