MORE than $15 million in compensation has been quietly paid to two disabled Canberrans in the past nine months because of medical negligence at Calvary Public Hospital when they were children.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The two large payouts mean Calvary Public Hospital's compensation bill for 2012-13 appears to exceed the $10.5 million paid out by the territory's biggest health provider, Canberra Hospital, in the same period.
Calvary Public has refused to reveal its total medical negligence bill from recent years but settlement documents in the ACT Supreme Court show the hospital paid $8 million of the $15 million to a 12-year-old boy with cerebral palsy, a condition linked to allegedly poor treatment during pregnancy and birth in 2001.
The hospital also paid another $250,000 in legal costs to the boy's legal firm Slater and Gordon.
It was alleged that during the mother's pregnancy, the hospital did not diagnose and treat cholestasis, described by medical textbooks as a failure of the liver in which bile cannot flow from the liver to the first part of the small intestine.
The plaintiff's lawyers argued that consensus opinion among obstetricians considered it a dangerous condition that could injure the foetus and damage a baby's brain.
Intensive monitoring before birth and during labour was recommended as well as early delivery no later than 38 weeks' gestation.
Instead the mother, who brought the legal action on behalf of her son in 2012, did not have the baby until she was full term and the baby was born floppy and blue and did not cry at birth.
The second case involved a 20-year-old woman paid $7 million, plus $164,641 for costs to her legal firm, Maurice Blackburn, because of an alleged failure to diagnose severe complications in her diabetes, a condition known as ketoacidosis, when she was three years old.
According to court documents, responsibility for the payout was shared between the two defendants, Calvary Hospital and Dr John Petelczyc, after a seven-year legal battle.
Despite the negotiated settlement, the court paperwork shows Calvary and Dr Petelczyc did not admit to incorrectly diagnosing the patient and denied negligence and causing damage to the patient.
In particular the doctor denied he first made a false diagnosis, followed by a delayed diagnosis, of the girl's diabetic condition.
In the statement of claim filed in the court, the list of the woman's disabilities runs to almost two A4 pages and includes short fingers, malformed feet, blindness in the left eye, impaired memory and gross motor function and language skills, as well as an inability to travel on her own or work.
