The coroner in Lagos probing the death of pastry chef Peju Ugboma has indicted doctors at Premier Specialist Medical Centre for negligence.
Mrs Ugboma died on April 25, 2021 after suffering internal bleeding following an elective hysterectomy operation for a fibroid condition at the Victoria Island-based hospital.
Hysterectomy is a surgical procedure to remove the womb after which a woman is unable to get pregnant or have periods.
The 41-year-old was the founder of a pastry company, I Luv Desserts.
After the surgery in April, she complained of severe abdominal pain and discomfort. She died afterward at EverCare Specialist Hospital.
The coroner Magistrate Mukaila Fadeyi said that the “only logical conclusion that one can reach is that the deceased died as a result of a combination of lack of due diligence and adequate investigations of her health status before embarking on the surgery, substandard care, inadequate monitoring and the failure of appropriate response to abnormal patient’s vital signs.”
A total of 16 witnesses testified before the coroner including the widower, doctors, pathologists and others.
In his verdict which lasted about five hours on Thursday, the coroner also said that careless entries in the early observation charts, as well as poorly documented case notes on the monitoring of the deceased and failure of the immediate involvement of the operating surgeons in her case of post-op complication as well as the absence of vital medical devices like the CT scan to detect Intra-abdominal bleeding also contributed to her death.
“There was an unwillingness of the doctors and consultants to return the deceased to the theatre to arrest haemoperitoneum haemorrhage and the lack of urgency to transfer her to another facility until it was too late,” he said.
The coroner, who held that Premier hospital owed the late Ugboma a better duty of care than she got, also frowned at the use of part-time doctors especially when he noted that the hospital’s doctors who were indicted by the medical panel of inquiry were part-time doctors.
In the end, Magistrate Fadeyi concluded that “the late Peju Ugboma was a victim of serious avoidable medical negligence occasioned by the actions and inactions of the hospital.”
Magistrate Fadeyi recommended that the code of conduct and ethics of medical practitioners should be tightly reviewed to severely punish negligence in cases of breach of duty of care to their patients.
He also recommended that the state government should not limit funding to only government hospitals but should render funds to private facilities to buy equipment.
After the coroner’s verdict, the widower Mr Ugboma told journalists, “I’m very happy with the outcome of the inquest, it’s been a very long one. The circumstances of my wife’s death were not satisfactory.”
On his next steps, he said that his lawyers will advise him on how the hold the doctors accountable.
