Dear Readers,
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| Dr Danie van der Walt |
For
years doctors in South
Africa have supposedly been policed by the
Health Professions Council (HPC). Established
in 1974 this statutory body that is meant to set and maintain ethical standards
for the medical profession claims to be “Protecting the public and guiding the
profession.” In reality it acts more like a doctor protection society than anything
else.
In spite of this the Sunday
Times now tells us that the Medical Protection Society and eight other healthcare
organisations like the Federation of South African Surgeons are campaigning to
have doctors exempted from the culpable homicide law. Jailing doctors for
medical mistakes they believe is too severe and they have asked the Minister of
Justice Ronald Lamola to review this legislation.
This move was prompted by the imprisonment in 2017 of
73-year-old gynaecologist Dr Danie van der Walt, and another doctor who is
facing a murder charge. Van der Walt became the first doctor to be jailed in South Africa
for medical negligence after his patient 23-year-old Pamela Daweti died in 2005
during a complicated birth. The HPC treated the matter with its usual doctor
friendly approach and fined the gynae R10 000.
Her family took the matter further and in the Witbank
regional court he was convicted of culpably homicide but only served eight
months of a five year prison sentence before being paroled. Subsequently when he took the
case to the Constitutional Court
the judges there decided that the magistrate had incorrectly convicted him by
using her own research which was not able to be tested in court.
The Sunday Times report
is headlined Ease up on negligence laws, doctors urge minister when in fact the
Health Professions Council has been taking a soft line with erring doctors for
as long as it has existed. Almost 20
years ago its President at the time Dr Nicky Padayachee undertook to do
something about what he described as the “inappropriate light sentences” his
council was giving guilty practitioners.
He was going to see that there was a “radical overhaul” of
Council procedures so that it “could do its job as a watchdog for the public”,
but nothing much changed because if it had orthopaedic surgeon Dr Wynne
Lieberthal would not have been able to go on maiming numerous people over a
period of more than two decades. Some of them even died not long after
Lieberthal had cut open their backs.
My book The Butcher of Rosebank now on Amazon reveals the
deplorable way the HPC allowed Lieberthal to
continue operating in spite of ample evidence that he should have been struck
off the medical register very early in his career.
If that didn’t warrant a lengthy prison sentence I do not
know what does. But even after he was found guilty of all the seven charges of
unprofessional conduct he was facing and was struck off, it was not long before
he was reinstated under dubious circumstance and allowed to repeat his
butchery.
While the policing of Lieberthal is perhaps the worst
example of the deplorably lenient way the HPC treats errant doctors there are
many other examples happening all the time. The Police usually don’t want to
investigate these because they believe this is the job of the HPC which can’t
send doctors to prison or order them to pay compensation to patients they maim,
or even as happen in one case I came across, when the GP of an elderly woman
living on her own ripped off her entire life savings of several hundred thousand
rand.
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| Dr Peter Beale |
The second doctor the Medical Protection Society and the
others are worried about is Dr Peter Beale a 73-year-old Johannesburg paediatric surgeon. He has been
charged with murdering 10 year old Tayyaan Sayed two years ago when the boy
died while having a routine laparoscopic operation for reflux. He is also
accused of fraudulently misrepresenting the result of a biopsy.
He has now gone into hiding after his anaesthetist for the
operation Dr Abdulhay Munshi was shot dead in Johannesburg last year. The Police appear to
have made no headway in establishing who the killer was and the boy’s father
Mohammadh Sayed has denied any involvement.
“At the age of 65 or 70 doctors should have their licences
revoked because with age comes certain limitations,” he was quoted as saying. I
was told by a professor at the Wits
Medical School
that doctors in the public service have to retire at 65 but the HPC appears to
have set no age limit for those in private practice. The potential for life
threatening “mistakes” are limitless if doddering old surgeons are allowed to
do all kinds of complicated operations.
When you have such a weak kneed organisation like the
Health Professions Council it is not surprising that some people might loose
faith in the ability of the authorities to take appropriate action against a
doctor when a death occurs during one of his operations and mete out their own
brand of justice.
It
would be a very backward step if the Minister of Justice was to exclude doctors
from being charged with culpable homicide when one of their patients dies while
being treated. All unnatural deaths
should be dealt with by a criminal court and the Minister should alter the make
up of the HPC because when you have doctors judging doctors justice is bound to
suffer.
Regards
Jon, a Consumer watchdog with a particular interest in medical malpractice.
