KARACHI, July 12: An inquiry team submitted its report to the provincial health department about the reported ‘negligence’ of an orthopaedic surgeon of the Civil Hospital Karachi (CHK) who operated on the ‘wrong leg’ of a patient, it emerged on Friday.

The team corroborated the allegation as correct and held him and his aides responsible, sources said.

They added that patient Najma Chandio came from Jacobabad district for surgery after she had fractured her left leg. She was admitted to the CHK Orthopaedic Unit No 1 where she underwent two operations — first on Tuesday and then on Thursday.

Some media reports said senior orthopaedic surgeon Dr Aslam Siddiqui on Tuesday operated on the patient’s right leg instead of the left one that had been fractured in an accident. The fractured leg was operated upon on Thursday, they added.

Following the media reports, the health department constituted a team comprising three senior doctors of the Dow University of Health Sciences to inquire the matter and file its report.

The report compiled by the inquiry team stated that the surgeon was in the initial stage of the operation when he acknowledged the error and ‘repaired’ the right leg, which was not fractured.

“The operation of the fractured leg had been performed on Thursday and the patient is OK now,” said a health department official while speaking to Dawn.

The report said the surgeon blamed the operating theatre technician of giving him wrong briefing about the patient.

The official said all the government hospitals had duly been sent with the surgical security check list, mandated by the World Health Organisation, which made it compulsory to fill a document so that a medic was fully aware of the details of a patient.“It is a clear violation of the standard operating procedures of the WHO guidelines. It could be a human error of sorts, yet it is a negligence meriting action that the department is going to take,” said the official without elaborating.