A doctor who left a man in 'uncontrollable pain' after attaching a bowel to his stomach in a procedure 'not known to man' has been struck off from the profession. Dr Yasser Adly Abdel Rahman performed a five-hour procedure in which he connected up the patient's bowel so its contents would be deposited back into his stomach.
Botched operation at Royal Oldham Hospital
Dr Rahman, an NHS locum surgeon at Royal Oldham Hospital, messed up the emergency operation, leaving his young patient with a circular 'closed loop' between his bowels and stomach and unable to go to the toilet for three weeks. A medical practitioners' tribunal heard the blunder could have cost the man his life had it not been for the intervention of another medic who performed a second procedure. His mistakes were described as being 'at the extreme end of surgical error' by a fellow doctor.
In his own account of the procedure, Dr Rahman said he had decided to perform an operation called a laparotomy, making an incision in the abdomen, on August 25, 2020. He said he ended up having to cut a small bowel in two to remove a tumour. However, the procedure caused so much bleeding that the surgeon was forced to call upon another medic to assist him. The pair decided to carry out a gastrojejunostomy, another procedure to attach the stomach to the jejunum, part of the small intestine, in order to maintain the patient's digestive system.
Patient's condition deteriorates
But the patient reported being in 'increasing pain' following the procedure and that his bowels were not functioning properly. By September 4, the man was in a 'pain crisis', with his discomfort becoming 'uncontrollable' weeks later, leaving him continually vomiting and having large amounts of fluid extracted from his body. One ward sister said her anxiety 'went through the roof' when she saw the patient had still not passed wind or had bowel movements on September 8.
An experienced consultant general surgeon who took over his case found that Dr Rahman had connected the man's bowels with his stomach, forming a continuous loop. He said: 'I found that he had a retro-colic gastro-jejunostomy, but unfortunately the proximal loop of the resected small bowel had been anatomised to the stomach rather than the distal, this meant that the bowel contents leaving the stomach had nowhere to go apart from back into the stomach in a circular fashion.'
Surgeons express shock
Another surgeon who acted as a witness said he had never seen such a medical blunder, describing it as 'extremely wrong' and 'as bad as it gets for a consultant surgeon'. He added that Dr Rahman should have sought help before attempting to carry out the complicated procedure, saying all surgeons should 'know their limitations'.
Despite the obvious complications, Dr Rahman told the patient's family that the procedure had been successful. He assured the man's parents that he hadn't invented the operation and it had been done 'millions of times'.
Breach of restrictions leads to removal
The MPTS had placed restrictions on Dr Rahman, requiring him to seek permission before taking up any work outside the UK. It found he had breached those conditions after getting employed as a locum at Affidea Express Care Clinic in Ireland.
Ryan Donoghue, representing the General Medical Council (GMC), said Dr Rahman had performed an operation resulting in a condition which was 'incompatible with life'. He said the surgeon had failed to address the patient's report of severe pain and failed to get a second opinion.
In a ruling last month, the MPTS concluded that Dr Rahman's conduct was 'fundamentally incompatible with continued registration' and removed him from the medical register, thus indefinitely banning him from practicing as a doctor. Metro has approached the Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust for a comment.
