A botched brain surgery has earned a patient Ksh44.5 million after the Court awarded a patient compensation for the brain operation gone wrong.
High Court Judge George Odunga awarded the parents of the patient Ksh1 million following the botched surgery 14 years ago at Nairobi Hospital.
According to Justice Odunga, Anesthetist Dr. Praxedes Mandu Okutuyi and Nairobi Hospital will bear the costs of the award.
The Court was told that at the time of the operation, the patient was a Form Four candidate at St. Mary’s High School.
The hospital was held liable after the brain damage on the patient who is now an adult left him behaving like a six-year-old.
In their application to the court, the parents opined that their son would not have suffered the damage if the hospital machines were in good working condition.
Although uncommon, surgical operations and procedures including critical ones such as brain and heart surgery at times go wrong.
For instance, in March 2018, a monumental blunder happened at Kenyatta National Hospital (KNH) when the doctors opened the skull of a wrong patient.
It is only mid-way the operation that it was discovered that the patient on the surgical table was a mistaken identity who had been wheeled to the facility unconscious hours earlier.
In actual sense, the patient only required nursing and medication to heal a trauma swelling in his head, medically known as closed head injury.
However, the surgery, which saw KNH CEO Lily Koros suspended, was meant for another man who was wheeled into the facility equally unconscious and on the same day.
The right head surgery candidate had a blood clot in his brain which was to be removed through a surgical procedure with a patient-labelling mishap being blamed for the mix-up.
Again in September 2018, Governor Mike Sonko found 12 dead infants hidden at Pumwani Maternity Hospital with reports indicating that they died after a blackout that interrupted power supply to the nursery.
