Medical negligence: Doctor directed to pay damages worth millions

Incorrect diagnosis of infant’s condition wasted time.

LAHORE:

A consumer court awarded around Rs45 million damages on Monday to complainants in a medical malpractice case.

On October 17, 2007, Syed Ali Murtaza and Marium Murtaza had filed a suit against Dr Tahir Masood Ahmed, a professor of pediatrics, and Dr Huma Arshad Cheema, a professor of hepatology and gastroenterology at Children’s Hospital, Lahore. They had sought Rs57.5 million in damages and medical expenditures from the two for neglecting the treatment and diagnosis of their daughter Syeda Durr-e-Zahra alias Maria.

The petitioners said that they took their infant daughter for medical checkup to Dr Ahmed. “He told us that she was suffering from jaundice but would get well within two months. He failed to diagnose the actual disease. When she did not get better, we took her to Dr Ahmed a few weeks later. He recommended a number of tests. Later, he referred us to Dr Cheema, who recommended more tests. She then said that there was something wrong with the child’s gall bladder. However, a test by the Shaukat Khanum Hospital proved that her gall bladder was alright. They assured us that there was nothing wrong with her liver,” the petitioners said.

They said that around three months were wasted in this way and the child’s liver was damaged. “Eventually, we had to take our daughter to the United Kingdom for a liver transplant operation. The surgery is not only extremely costly but also dangerous both for the donor and the recipient,” they said.

The petitioners demanded £206,625 as cost of the transplant, Rs164,860 as travelling costs, £5,641 as living cost, Rs20million for the mental and physical torture they suffered, Rs20million for the health damages suffered by their daughter and the donor, Rs646,693 medical expenditure during the first year after surgery and Rs395,820 for every year from then on.

In their written replies, the defendants denied negligence.

In its ruling, the court dismissed the claims against Dr Cheema because she adopted “the correct line of investigation and it was on account of her investigation that biliary atresia was eventually diagnosed.” The court held Dr Ahmed liable for a payment of £155,000 to the Punjab government, which bore the cost of treatment (the child’s father is a government employee); £57,267 for liver transplant; Rs164,860 for travelling costs; Rs646,693 as medical expenditure for the first year; Rs395,820 per year for the child from the second year of her transplant; and Rs100,000 litigation charges to the complainants.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 12^th, 2015.