Page 2987 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 16 October 2007
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oral and maxillofacial plastic and reconstructive services. Put simply, it refers to problems concerning the jaw and mouth area. People who get assaulted or sustain injuries during sports often get fractured jaws, for example, and need urgent attention. The report states, “The Canberra Hospital provides a high level trauma service to residents of the ACT and Capital region but lacks an oral and maxillofacial service.” The report goes on to state, at page 4, that “it is both urgent and essential to re-establish the proper direction and balance of service commitments in the specialties of oral and maxillofacial and plastic and reconstructive surgery”. The report states that “the population of the ACT is sufficient to justify a full oral and maxillofacial … service”.
The cases of 14 patients who have had botched surgery or were seriously misdiagnosed for mouth and jaw problems have come to the attention of the opposition. We understand that there have been misdiagnoses and botched surgery that has had to be corrected by other surgeons—not at the Canberra Hospital—going back to 2001. And we know from this report and an earlier one—the Reid report, commissioned by the now Chief Minister, Mr Stanhope—that the government is well aware of these problems.
The nub of the problem is that the Canberra Hospital does not have dedicated oral surgeons and that plastic surgeons and dentists are performing oral surgery instead. This is despite the 2005 report describing the practice as “insufficient and inappropriate” and calling for the urgent appointment of an oral surgeon. A number of patients—the opposition knows of at least 14—have had to go elsewhere for remedial treatment and have experienced avoidable pain and ongoing medical problems because of either misdiagnosis or incompetent surgery.
We are talking about pain, disfigurement in the form of patients left with misaligned jaws and overbites, infection, damage to nerve tissue, and loss of teeth. In cases of remedial work, patients have found that they have had to have their jaws rebroken and reset; in one case at least, what should have taken six weeks to heal took 18 months. Financial costs to patients to remedy the original treatment at the Canberra Hospital have been considerable, often running into thousands of dollars. Patients have taken longer to recover and have experienced more complications than they might have, because of botched operations or misdiagnoses. As one patient’s relative wrote in a complaint in 2002:
It seems absolutely unbelievable that you are not able to be treated by a doctor specializing in your condition when admitted to Canberra’s main public hospital.
It is understood that currently the ACT Health Clinical Privileges Committee is investigating the treatment of at least 14 maxillofacial patients.
The first requirement of medicine is to do no harm; unfortunately some patients are being harmed by the treatment they are receiving or have received. One of these is Leeann Bell, who says that the operation to fix her broken jaw at the Canberra Hospital was botched. It was done by a plastic surgeon. She has been told by a private specialist that it needs another operation. Another is Vincent Nguyen, who endured two failed operations on his broken jaw at the Canberra Hospital in August this year before turning to a private oral surgeon who fixed the problem.
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