High-profile Australian neurosurgeon Charlie Teo has been found guilty of unsatisfactory professional conduct by the Health Care Complaints Commission and accused of having a “substantially experimental” attitude doing his surgery on two patients.
Dr. Teo was facing allegations from the families of two different women—referred to as Patient A and Patient B—who say they were not informed about the risks involved before agreeing to surgery. Neither woman regained consciousness after the surgeries in 2018 and 2019 at Sydney’s Prince of Wales Private Hospital. Both women had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer.
The commission spent eight days investigating complaints relating to two women who were diagnosed with terminal brain tumours, with Dr. Teo being accused of misleading patients, failing to obtain informed consent from both patients and their families before surgery, and speaking inappropriately to a patient’s daughter after surgery.In its 112-page decision released on Wednesday morning, the commission’s Medical Professional Standards Committee noted that Dr. Teo had decided to operate even when the risk of surgery outweighed any potential benefits.