A former AMA president has been found guilty of careless conduct after over-inflating a balloon catheter which burst while he carried out an angioplasty.
Cardiologist Dr Keith Woollard, AMA president between 1996 and 1998, carried out the surgery on a 70-year-old woman in August 2006 at Mount Hospital in Perth.
The WA state administrative tribunal was told the catheter balloon burst while he was trying to dilate a lesion in the right coronary artery. When he tried to remove it the shaft of the balloon then broke off, dissecting the artery and leaving a fragment of the balloon in the artery. The patient underwent emergency heart bypass survery and survived.
The Medical Board of Australia, who brought the case, alleged that Dr Woollard acted both carelessly and incompetently.
The board said Dr Woollard asked for the balloon to be inflated to 18 times that of the atmosphere – four “atmospheres” above its rated burst pressure. It was then fully deflated and inflated for a second time but ruptured.
Dr Woollard, who was nearing the end of his training in coronary angioplasties at the time, denied the allegation despite it being documented in the event log written by nursing staff while the procedure was taking place.
He referred to a report he said he dictated for the patient’s files within minutes of the procedure ending. This letter, which was undated and unsigned, declared the balloon was only ever inflated to 15 atomospheres. The Medical Board claimed that Dr Woollard was lying.
The tribunal ruled that the event log was “more likely to be [a] correct” account of what happened given it was a “truly contemporaneous record of the procedure”.
It added: “[We] do not accept the veracity of Dr Woollard’s testimony that he only caused the inflation of the balloon to a pressure of 15 atmospheres.
“In arriving at this unfortunate finding, we have borne in mind that Dr Woollard is a senior medical practitioner who has been...chair of the General Cardiology Council of the Cardiac Society of Australia and New Zealand for the past five years, and is a former national and state president of the AMA, positions reflecting high trust and confidence in him.
“Dr Woollard’s error was not trivial...his actions involved a departure from elementary and generally accepted standards from which a cardiologist training to be an interventional cardiologist could scarcely be heard to say that he or she was ignorant.”
Although the tribunal ruled that Dr Woollard acted carelessly, it dismissed the medical board’s claim he acted incompetently, stressing that at the time he was still in training and had carried out the procedure while under supervision from an accredited interventional cardiologists Dr Ajit Menon.
The tribunal is expected to rule on any sanctions against Dr Woollard later this year.