Question is, why did the surgeon and team not object to this?
Patients often depend on their appointed surgeon to choose the anaesthetist.
From Straits Times —
SINGAPORE – An anaesthetist who walked out of the operating theatre several times to take calls from other patients while another in his care was undergoing surgery has been suspended for 2½ years, the Singapore Medical Council said on Tuesday.
During the operation in 2016, the patient suffered a complication when a blood clot blocked oxygen from his lungs, an event known as a pulmonary embolism. He was successfully resuscitated by a team of doctors, but died the following day.
The Singapore Medical Council’s disciplinary tribunal said the patient’s chances of surviving the embolism was very low. But that chance may have been further lowered by Dr Islam Md Towfique’s delay in recognising the changes in the patient’s vital signs and consequent delay in taking action.
Dr Islam told the tribunal it was common practice for anaesthetists to leave the operating theatre for short periods of time.
The patient, 64, had surgery performed at Gleneagles Hospital on a fracture caused by his bone marrow cancer on Sept 1, 2016. Given his age, obesity, prior heart problems and cancer, he was “considered a high anaesthetic risk patient”, said the tribunal.
During the operation, his oxygen reading fell below 90 per cent, “into the 80s and 70s”. Normal range for blood oxygen level is between 96 per cent and 99 per cent. Despite that, the oxygen given to the patient was not increased.
Hospital parent firm Parkway Pantai Ltd said in a letter to Dr Islam that “increasing the oxygen delivery is one of the first few actions that an anaesthetist should initiate when a patient’s SpO2 falls, and yet for almost 50 minutes, with the SpO2 either un-recordable or in an unacceptable range, this remedial action was not taken”.
