Watch out if you are in Royal Brisbane hospital

Another discouraging story of a foreign trained doctor (a surgeon) in Queensland being "out of his depth" was reported today in the Courier Mail.

This came out of the ongoing health inquiry.

Dr Lakshman Jayasekera told inquiry commissioner Geoff Davies, QC, he was called in by a nurse to provide urgent help for the patient.

He said he was not working when "I received a telephone call from a theatre nurse, whose name I recall only as Gail, (who) called me and asked me to come in, using the words 'Lucky, can you come in as we have a patient who is going to die on the table'.

"I immediately went to the hospital and I found a patient that was in the process of being operated on by the Russian doctor and he had conducted an operation on this patient not knowing what to do."

Dr Jayasekera, an Australian-qualified surgeon and fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, said he completed the operation successfully and complained to a superior who asked him to supervise Dr Kotlovsky in future."

But the Russian doctor complains:

'Dr Kotlovsky described the allegations as "absolutely incredible".

"I would like to know what they are talking about," he said. "It is completely incorrect. I remember all my patients at Bundaberg Base Hospital."

In evidence at the inquiry last month, Dr Kees Nydam, a member of Bundaberg hospital's management team, described the case of Dr Kotlovsky as "a bit of a disaster".


Dr Nydam said he questioned if Dr Kotlovsky ever had the pediatric surgery qualifications he claimed to have achieved in Moscow.

"Nursing staff, junior medical staff said 'this guy is a bit funny, we don't know exactly what'," Dr Nydam told former inquiry commissioner Tony Morris, QC.'


But is the doctor still working in Queensland hospitals? Yes indeed - now at Royal Brisbane hospital.

What's going on here? I trust that one result of this whole inquiry process will be some sort of urgent revision of how professional standards of surgeons are to be properly monitored and maintained.

Also, you can hardly criticise any patients in the Queensland public health system for questioning the capabilities of a foreign trained doctor who is treating them.