St George Hospital is refusing to release any details of an epidural blunder that left a young mother crippled, fuelling concerns that the public health system is not being held accountable for its mistakes.
Grace Wang, 32, suffered massive damage to her nervous system, leaving her in a wheelchair and unable to hold her newborn son, after an antiseptic was injected into her spine instead of anaesthetic during an epidural at St George Hospital in June last year.
In a statement to the Australian Women’s Weekly late last week, a hospital spokeswoman said a NSW Health root cause analysis report was completed in September but it was an internal document and never intended to be released publicly.
The spokeswoman said the hospital would not release it despite the report being leaked to a Sydney newspaper.
Grace Wang’s case was subject to legal action, the hospital said, and it would be inappropriate to discuss it further.
The hospital also refused to reveal if the anaesthetist at the centre of the mistake was subject to any disciplinary action or if the doctor was still treating patients.
Lorraine Long, founder of the Medical Error Action Group, says she is not surprised by the hospital’s apparent non-disclosure policy.
“It’s something that happens in almost all cases where medical mistakes have been made,” she said.
“The welfare of the patient becomes secondary to the legal objectives of the hospital. This is a public hospital, paid for by our taxes and the public has a right to know what happened. Investigations such as this should be transparent.”
Long says that medical mistakes are one of the leading causes of deaths in Australia, second only to heart disease. Her group claims that as many as 18,000 people die annually because of medical error, citing a 1995 report called the The Quality in Australian Health Care Study, though some medical authorities dispute this figure.
“The thing with Grace Wang’s case is that it is not a rarity,” Long said. “And it is not an unusual catastrophic event. It is a regular daily occurrence. One in 10 people admitted to hospitals can expect to be affected via a mistake.
“These things are not accidents — accidents are unpredictable and unavoidable. But medical mistakes are predictable and they are avoidable.”
Related: Epidural case sparks medical review
Long accused health departments of operating “like a spy organisation”.
It’s them and us and they have a terrible attitude towards people — this is normal, routine, institutionalised behaviour,” Long said.
“Some people think that the public hospital system doesn’t have to explain itself but it’s our taxes that pay for the system and what we get in return is not good enough — it’s a Russian roulette health system.”
Your say: Do you think the hospital should be more open about its investigation into what happened to Grace Wang?
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