14 DAY TRIAL // Just last week, a surgeon who got his license 41 years ago was placed on probation by the California Medical Board. The surgeon, identified as Dr. Charles Coonan Streit, will not be allowed to operate on another patient for 3 years.
In fact, it seems that this guy messed up so badly that, during the time that he will be on probation, he will not even be allowed to supervise physician assistants. In a nutshell, he might want to consider another career.
So, what did this surgeon do?
Information shared with the public says that the entire conundrum began quite a while back, in February 2012. At that time, Dr. Charles Coonan Streit was asked to operate on a 59-year-old man who was a federal inmate.
As detailed by the Orange County Register, the man, whose identity has not been made public, had a tumor growing on one of his kidneys. The surgeon was supposed to cut him open, remove the diseased kidney and be done with it.
Before going into surgery at the St. Jude Medical Center in the city of Fullerton in California, Dr. Charles Coonan Streit didn't get around to checking his patient's complete medical records. Apparently, he didn't have access to them.
Rather than postpone the intervention for a while, the surgeon decided to rely on his memory alone and whatever paperwork he did have and operate on the 59-year-old man nonetheless. For some reason, nobody tried to stop him.
The result was that, instead of removing the patient's diseased kidney, he removed his healthy one. When the intervention was over, Dr. Charles Coonan Streit found that he had a working kidney on the table and a tumor-laden one inside the patient.
Once the surgeon's mistake was discovered, the patient, who at that time was serving time at the low-security federal prison in San Pedro, was left with no choice but let doctors operate on him again. Otherwise, he risked renal failure.
The hospital was fined for the surgeon's mistake
It is understood that, last year, the St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton, California, was made to pay a $100,000 (about €81,000) for the surgeon's mistake. The somewhat good news is that, following this incident and its subsequent fine, staff at the St. Jude Medical Center learned their lesson.
Thus, the hospital now asks that a patient's medical records, CT scans included, be submitted before a surgery is carried out. “It was our failure to follow our protocol regarding displaying the patient’s diagnostic images that ultimately resulted in this error,” said hospital spokesperson DruAnn Copping.
