A further article on the 30 Jan 2015 incident in which a 20 year old patient’s heart stopped beating during a breast augmentation operation at this institute‘s Parramatta clinic appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald today.
(To view previous SMH articles use this link and this link.)
Today’s article is headed:-
And in it, it’s author, Anna Patty, claims that it’s understood that when the patient was rushed to Blacktown Hospital by ambulance she “was given intralipid, a drug most commonly used to to treat an OVERDOSE of local anaesthetic.” So, an OVERDOSE instead of “a reaction to the anaesthetic” as had been claimed by the Cosmetic Institute! Serious stuff indeed!
There is much more damning stuff you can read, but, to us, the main issue has always been how qualified or otherwise the anaesthetist was who administered the anaesthetic – and the Cosmetic Institute has never been upfront and honest on this.
To begin with a Dr Erez Ben-Menachem was “wheeled out” to be a spokesman for the Institute – it was specifically stated that he was NOT the anaesthetist at the operation. So who was? In a further SMH article on 18 Apr 2015, nearly 3 months after the incident, David Segal, the Institute’s Managing Director set out to solve this problem – he was quoted as claiming, “The anaesthetist who was present in this procedure was a senior consultant from St Vincent’s hospital.”
This immediately came over as so suspicious that we immediately sent a letter by email to Mr Segal, with a copy to Dr Eddy Dona, saying:-
This letter was never even acknowledged – of course.
When you deal with the David Segals and Eddy Donas of this world, matters so often end up where this one has – with reasonable questions being raised where they won’t even stand up for themselves and acknowledge.
It’s then up to us as health services consumers to decide what we do about it. We believe passionately that where our health and wellbeing is involved, we can only afford to deal with those with “squeaky clean” reputations. It’s up to us to us to decide for ourselves, individually, whether the David Segals and Eddy Donas of this world pass the “squeaky clean” test.