Gqeberha surgeon Dr Nico van Niekerk, who was earlier in 2023 found guilty of malpractice after one of his patients nearly died on his operating table, has lost his application for leave to appeal against the ruling.
In April, Van Niekerk, a general surgeon at Netcare Greenacres Hospital, was found to have acted unlawfully when he performed laparoscopic surgery intended to correct a previous procedure his patient, Sherillee Morris, had undergone.
It was said at the time he had “lost his way” and injured her supra-hepatic inferior vena cava (IVC), which led to sudden and severe bleeding in her chest cavity.
A specialist cardiothoracic surgeon had to perform an emergency left-sided thoracotomy otherwise Morris would have bled to death, the court found.
As a consequence, Morris lost 300ml of blood, had to be resuscitated, given a blood transfusion, and suffered hypovolemic shock which could have led to organ failure.
Van Niekerk had brought the application for leave to appeal against judge Tanya Zietsman’s judgment on at least 22 grounds, including that the court had erred by accepting certain expert witness testimony.
Zietsman dismissed Van Niekerk’s claims in his application for leave to appeal and found there were no reasonable prospects of another court coming to a different conclusion.
“As a result, the application for leave to appeal is dismissed with costs, such costs to include the cost of two counsel,” Zietsman said.
During the trial, which started in March 2021, Van Niekerk admitted he had caused the injuries suffered by Morris, but denied any negligence, eventually agreeing to pay R2.1m in damages.
Zietsman’s initial judgment confirmed Van Niekerk had acted negligently and ordered him to cover the costs of the court case as well.
During the trial, the court heard expert testimony by a registered specialist surgical gastroenterologist and retired emeritus professor from the University of Cape Town, Prof Sandie Thomson, who told the court it was his view Van Niekerk had caused the life-threatening injury unnecessarily, as there had been no rush to perform the May 28 2015 surgery on Morris.
Morris was kept in ICU for more than a week and had to undergo further surgery on June 7 2015.
In court papers, it was revealed that on the day of Morris’s May 28 surgery, only Van Niekerk and a GP were present, the latter having to perform two tasks simultaneously, namely assist Van Niekerk and to operate the camera.
That Van Niekerk had performed the surgery without specialist assistance showed a lack of understanding of how complex the surgery could be Thomson said, and rebutted Van Niekerk’s claim that he performed on average one such surgery a week.
After her second operation, Morris was again transferred to the ICU, where she stayed until June 13.
Two weeks later, she was admitted to Aurora Hospital until September 7 2015.
A medico-legal report revealed that as a result, Morris suffered from mild expressive and receptive aphasia, a language impairment which affected her everyday functions, struggled to respond to visual cues, and could identify only objects and not letters.
She lost her job as a senior administrative officer at the provincial health department, being medically boarded in 2019.
Zietsman found Van Niekerk had been negligent on four specific grounds, including that he failed to submit Morris to adequate preoperative treatment; that he did not conduct proper planning and execution of the redo surgery as well as that of the June 7 surgery; and that he failed to act with professional skill as expected of a specialist.
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