Liu Minxia

    mllmx@msn.com

    A DOCTOR at a hospital was suspended from performing surgeries yesterday after being accused of mishandling a surgery leading to the death of a 74-year-old man and of falsifying the patient’s medical records.

    The patient, identified as Zhong Mouxi, underwent a minimally invasive surgery at Peking University Shenzhen Hospital on Oct. 19 to remove his gallbladder. He felt unwell after the surgery and a Nov. 6 checkup found Zhong was suffering from a digestive tract perforation and abdominal infection. He was then transferred to the hospital’s intensive care unit (ICU) and later to Shenzhen No. 3 People’s Hospital. Zhong died Dec. 30.

    Zhong’s family accused the doctor, Peng Yi, of improper operation methods and falsifying the patient’s medical records. They published some proof they had obtained on WeChat on Tuesday and filed a complaint with the hospital, which suspended the doctor from surgical duties starting yesterday.

    Zhong’s daughter-in-law, Yao Yao, claimed that the hospital deleted some key information regarding the surgery and reported using a lower amount of medicine when they wrote Zhong’s records. Yao also accused the hospital of distorting facts about Zhong’s conditions, as the hospital said that Zhong had been suffering from abdominal pains for five years prior to the surgery, and that he had coronary heart disease, while Yao said Zhong actually only felt abdominal pains for three days and never had heart disease.

    The hospital responded yesterday, saying that they felt sorry for Zhong and his family and would cooperate with the government’s investigation.

    The doctor, Peng, couldn’t be reached for comment.

    The city’s health supervision bureau said last night that the investigation was ongoing.

    A similar incident in mid-December previously drew wide attention to the hospital, which apologized for the death of a 27-year-old man after he underwent a minimally invasive surgery to remove his appendix at the hospital.