Monday, December 18, 2017

Leaving His Mark

A British surgeon just pleaded guilty to two counts of assault for - I kid you not - writing his initials on patients' livers with an argon beam:
In a hearing at Birmingham crown court on Wednesday, Simon Bramhall admitted two counts of assault by beating relating to incidents on 9 February and 21 August 2013. He pleaded not guilty to the more serious charges of assault occasioning actual bodily harm.

The renowned liver, spleen and pancreas surgeon used an argon beam, used to stop livers bleeding during operations and to highlight an area due to be worked on, to sign his initials into the patients’ organs. The marks left by argon are not thought to impair the organ’s function and usually disappear by themselves.

The 53-year-old was first suspended from his post as a consultant surgeon at Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth hospital in 2013 after a colleague spotted the initials “SB” on an organ during follow-up surgery on one of Bramhall’s patients.

Speaking after Bramhall’s suspension, Joyce Robins, of Patient Concern, said: “This is a patient we are talking about, not an autograph book.”
BTW, anyone else feel it's been a strange year?

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