Blunder the knife - This is the doctor from hell

Blunder the knife

By Ciaran McGuigan
Sunday, 22 February 2009

This is the doctor from hell – whose surgery on a patient has been branded “barbaric” by a medical watchdog body. German-born surgeon Dr Clemens Gerstenkorn was struck-off the medical register last week following a damning probe into his work at the Belfast City Hospital over a three-year period.

The General Medical Council’s Fitness to Practise panel found against Gerstenkorn on scores of complaints, including:

causing needless pain by operating on a patient who had NOT been given an anaesthetic;

carrying out a liver transplant WITHOUT the female patient’s informed consent;

ignoring the advice of colleagues and the Kidney Advisory Group when deciding to carry out a transplant;

asking a patient to STRIP to her underwear in view of a ground-floor window where passers by could see;

giving one patient a stark choice, ‘new kidney or minus a leg?’; and

being rude and aggressive to hospital staff and shouting at a hospital secretary.

The panel also found the surgeon had “worrying gaps in his medical knowledge, made all the more dangerous by his absolute belief in his own opinion, even in the face of strong evidence to the contrary”.

The GMC panel, sitting in Manchester, said Gerstenkorn had “abused his position of trust and violated the rights of his patients” and banned him from operating in the UK.

In total the kidney transplant surgeon faced more than 130 charges involving 21 patients.

And repeated charges that his treatment was “unprofessional”, “inappropriate” and “not in the best interests of the patient” were proven against him.

Following a hearing that first opened more than a year ago, GMC panel chairman Andrew Reid last week delivered a blistering verdict on Gerstenkorn’s treatment of patients and his attitude towards his colleagues during his time at Belfast City Hospital between August 2003 and October 2006.

Mr Reid said the panel had found that while “it did not consider that Mr Gerstenkorn had exhibited general incompetence in a technical sense, it found many areas where his clinical judgement, professional relationships, record-keeping and consent-taking were incompetent”.

In giving Gerstenkorn the boot from the medical register, he added: “Given the panel’s findings of dangerous attitudinal problems exhibited by Mr Gerstenkorn; of harm done to patients; gaps in his medical knowledge; poor clinical judgement and serious departures from the standards set out in Good Medical Practice, the panel has concluded that taking no action would be a wholly insufficient response.”

Mr Reid added: “The panel has already concluded that Mr Gerstenkorn has demonstrated dangerous, deep-seated attitudinal problems.

“Furthermore it found that Mr Gerstenkorn had worrying gaps in his medical knowledge, made all the more dangerous by his absolute belief in his own opinion, even in the face of strong evidence to the contrary, and his unwillingness to consider the views of his colleagues.

“The panel was deeply concerned about Mr Gerstenkorn’s lack of insight into the seriousness of his actions and their potential to cause harm to patients and to the wider public interest.

“The Panel concluded that Mr Gerstenkorn had done serious harm to patients.

“Whilst it noted his own |evidence that no one had been killed, he had done serious harm to Patient S, whose chance of receiving a successful second renal transplant was jeopardised by his actions.”

The shamed medic can appeal the panel’s decision.

Gerstenkorn had previously been sacked by the former Belfast City Hospital Trust, but last year won almost £60,000 in compensation after an industrial tribunal found that he had been unfairly dismissed.

The tribunal found in his favour after the hospital sacked him on the grounds that he had misled them during the appointment process.

Gerstenkorn, while applying for the post in the specialist renal unit, had not disclosed his reasons for leaving previous jobs.

They included a posting in Scotland where he had been due to face a disciplinary hearing on the day he quit and a posting in London from which he had been suspended pending an investigation by the GMC. Although he was eventually cleared by that investigation, he did not declare the probe to his new employers.

Although he won a pay out, the |tribunal told him that his compensation would have been much more than £200,000 but that he had contributed to his own sacking by not being open during the recruitment process.

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/sunday-life/blunder-the-knife-14198894.html?r=RSS