Doctors face criminal charges after botched cataract operations

Two Apollonion doctors are facing criminal charges after a patient died and seven others suffered serious post-surgery complications following a cataract surgery at the hospital in 2020, it emerged on Wednesday.

In a tweet, attorney-general Giorgos Savvides said police have been instructed “to submit criminal cases against two people in relation to incidents of contamination of patients during eye surgeries”.

No further details were given, but Cyprus Mail sources confirmed the announcement concerned two doctors at the Apollonion hospital in Nicosia.

An investigation, which lasted over a year, was launched at the hospital after a group of eight patients, aged 60 to 80 years old were infected with pseudomonas endophthalmitis infection, an antibiotic resistant bacteria that lives in the back of the eye and damages the nerve tissue right after a cataract surgery at the hospital.

Five of the patients who underwent cataract surgery in October 2020 each had to have one of their eyes removed after corrective procedures to prevent the infection from spreading to the brain.

Ophthalmologist Theodoros Potamitis, the private doctor who carried out many of the corrective operations, said that it was unusual for eight patients in a row to get infected which meant that “something during the surgery had gone wrong, either a procedure or a piece of equipment was broken or not cleaned properly”.

One of the patients died, according to a relative who told media that after the corrective surgery, the patient had to return to the hospital.

The patients were hospitalised in the Makarios and Nicosia public hospitals after they were infected, and most were overseen by Potamitis.

Apollonion private hospital had said it has followed all indicated measures, including the suspension of the operation of the operating theatre in question and of a related facility and carried out all the appropriate checks and probes.