Doctor 'switched off patients' anaesthetic machines to test trainees'

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Dr Murphy, pictured here on his way to court, is accused of endangering his patients' lives

A consultant anaesthetist put the lives of patients at risk by switching off vital machines during surgery as a way of testing junior doctors, a medical tribunal was told.

Dr James Murphy, 49, turned off the power supply and told junior colleagues he was going on a coffee break before walking out of the operating theatre.

The idea was that they should be able to spot the "deliberate mistake". But the tribunal heard how one registrar failed to do so - and was left to manually ventilate a patient when a machine supplying oxygen was shut down without any back-up battery.

It also emerged that none of the patients had given their consent to the "training exercises" at the Cardiothoracic Centre in Liverpool.

Yesterday Dr Murphy appeared before the General Medical Council to answer charges of professional misconduct.

The panel heard that during a heart bypass operation in May 2005, Dr Murphy had been accompanied by fifth-year registrar Dr Hoo Kee Tsang.

Dr Tsang was monitoring the machine delivering gas, oxygen and ventilation to the patient. The surgeon proceeded to saw through the patient's breast bone. The procedure went without a hitch, the tribunal heard.

Timothy Smith for the GMC, said: "It was at or about this point that Dr Murphy told Dr Tsang that he was leaving the theatre in order to get a coffee.

"As he left the theatre Dr Murphy switched off the anaesthetic equipment at the mains and walked out. The consequence of that was that the equipment then shut down and the internal alarm sounded.

"That particular machine did not have a back-up power source. As a consequence the internal displays shut down and the external monitors present would also have shut down.

"The automatic gas delivery systems stopped. Dr Tsang did not appreciate that his supervising consultant had turned the machine off, nor that he was then the subject of what had been intended to be a training exercise."

The panel heard how Dr Tsang called for emergency oxygen supplies and commenced manually ventilating the patient while theatre staff called for Dr Murphy.

Mr Smith said: "It was up to five minutes later that he arrived and asked him if he was all right.

"Dr Murphy revealed he had disconnected the power supply in order to test Dr Tsang. He turned the power back on and the patient was reconnected to the machine and ventilation and automatic administration of anaesthetic was continued.

"Dr Murphy went on to explain that he had been testing Dr Tsang, noting that some machines had a battery supply and some did not and that if the machine did have a power supply it would able to continue to operate for up to 15 minutes or so.

"He confirmed, however, that in the course of undertaking this exercise he had not checked if the machine had battery power prior to turning it off."

The panel heard Dr Murphy was in charge of the training of 12 specialist registrars per year at the centre. It later emerged that he had carried out similar tests on two others, Dr Omar Al-Rawi and Dr David Patrick.

The GMC, sitting in Manchester, was told patients could have been starved of oxygen or could have begun to regain feeling during their open-heart operations as a result of the "unusual and orthodox and dangerous" stunts.

Mr Smith said: "These training exercises did not place the care of the patient as the first concern. They were entirely irrelevant to the care of the patient.

"The patients were not involved in the training exercise in the sense of giving their consent. In the circumstances, the patient was therefore exposed to a wholly unnecessary risk."

Dr Murphy denies professional misconduct.

The hearing continues.

 

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