A blind chiropractor who took nine minutes to call an ambulance while his patient was “convulsive, unconscious, unresponsive” on the floor, has been suspended for 12 months.
Mario Forte had been giving chiropractic treatment to James Halloran in December 2006 at his clinic in Adelaide when the patient collapsed. He later died in hospital.
Mr Forte was alone at the time and initially rang a fellow chiropractor, Robert Rose, for help and spent four minutes discussing the emergency before Mr Forte put the phone down and contacted a local general practice — Allcare Medical Clinic.
He was told by the receptionist to call an ambulance, advice that he ignored. Three minutes later he then attempted to call another general practice — the Florey Clinic — before dialling 000.
According to a judgement handed down by the SA Health Practitioners Tribunal last month, Mr Forte then summoned his elderly father and together they administered CPR, a procedure that the tribunal described as “late and inadequately executed”.
Mr Halloran was eventually taken to Adelaide Hospital but died after two days on life support.
The tribunal said that during the emergency Mr Forte had checked the patient’s pulse and that he was breathing but that he was “effectively unable to monitor the patient’s vital signs because he was blind”.
“In other words he did nothing effective towards assisting his patient during this time ... He could not check pupil dilation and the other things that would depend upon vision, such as skin pallor or foaming at the mouth. The fact that he could not do so and had that limitation should have occurred to him.”
“His assumption that the patient was suffering an epileptic fit was a guess and an incorrect one, not based upon any medical history reported by the patient.”
The tribunal accepted there was no “deliberate or callous disregard for the patient’s circumstances”.
It also said that it could not be concluded that “more timely resuscitative care” would have prevented Mr Halloran’s death. But it added: “[Even] if Mr Halloran was to die, Dr Forte’s negligence and incompetence remains just as grave, not in respect of the outcome but in respect of the fact that he did nothing.”
A coroner’s report into Mr Halloran’s death published in 2010 found it was due to a cardiorespiratory arrest of unknown cause and that he “did not suffer a vertebral artery dissection as the result of neck manipulation”.
However the coroner said much of Mr Forte’s evidence was unsatisfactory and unreliable, describing him as “unduly intractable and argumentative”.