Heart misdiagnosis fine $776,000
Posted By admin on December 10, 2009
A SYDNEY GP who misdiagnosed a patient suffering serious heart disease has been ordered to pay him $776,000 in damages.
Self-employed Sydney truck driver Kevin George first visited his general practitioner, Dr Hafizur Survery, on June 12, 2003 for advice and treatment for chest pains.
A little over a month later he underwent emergency heart surgery, which left the 57-year-old unable to work and with a life expectancy of only two years.
He has since undergone a life-prolonging heart transplant operation.
In the NSW Supreme Court on Wednesday, Dr Survery was ordered to pay Mr George $776,095, plus court costs, for failing to properly diagnose his condition.
If he had, the court was told, Mr George could have undergone a routine operation which would have put him behind the wheel of his truck again within three months.
Dr Survery had first ordered a electrocardiograph (ECG) scan, which was reported as normal, but the pain continued prompting Mr George to return to the doctor five more times within a month.
On July 22, Mr George was rushed to the emergency unit at Mt Druitt Hospital, where he was diagnosed with acute myocardial infarction and a failure of the left ventricle.
He underwent emergency surgery, during which he suffered a cardiac arrest and had to be resuscitated.
After he was discharged, doctors told Mr George the only way to increase his life expectancy - then two years - was to have a heart transplant which he did successfully in April 2005.
Since then he has developed a litany of medical problems including gout, osteoporosis, depression, problems with his memory and an increased risk of skin cancers - largely a reaction to the large number of immuno-suppressant drugs he is on.
He has been given between eight-and-a-half and 12-and-a-half years to live.
But Justice Clifton Hoeben was told that had Dr Survery properly diagnosed Mr George on his first visits, it might have been a very different outcome.
“The plaintiff (had he been properly treated) would have undergone angioplasty and probably a single coronary artery bypass graft to the right coronary artery stenosis,” he said in his judgment.
“He would have been able to return to work within three months of that process.”
In deciding costs, Justice Hoeben said as well as the economic losses he had already suffered and would suffer in the future, Mr George had also had to come to terms with taking on a very different role in his household.
“Perhaps the most significant change for the plaintiff has been the reversal of his position within the family,” he said.
“From being a robust and healthy man who was the family breadwinner, he is now unable to work at a job which he loved.
“He is often dependent upon his wife and has to restrict his physical activities. He also has to be regularly monitored by the heart transplant team to ensure that the side effects of his medication, or other co-morbidities, do not develop.
“There is no doubt that his quality of life has been significantly degraded.”
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