Inadequate Treatment Cited in Child Deaths

Ten of 12 young children who underwent heart surgery and died at a Winnipeg hospital in 1994--under the care of a physician now at UCLA--might have survived if given proper treatment, a report released Monday said.

“The evidence suggests that some of the children need not have died,” Associate Chief Judge Murray Sinclair wrote in his final report, following one of the longest inquests in Canadian history.

The children, operated on by Dr. Jonah Odim, a heart surgeon trained at Harvard and the University of Chicago, ranged in age from 2 days to 4 years.

Odim is now a research associate at UCLA Medical Center who helps obtain organs for transplantation. He works under supervision and UCLA is aware of no problems with his performance, said UCLA spokesman David Langness.

Langness said Odim had not had an opportunity to review the Canadian report and therefore declined to comment Monday.

According to Sinclair, “The evidence suggests that the Pediatric Cardiac Surgery Program at the Health Sciences Centre did not provide the standard of health care that it was mandated to provide and that parents believed--and had a right to expect--that their children would receive in 1994.”

Under the laws of the province of Manitoba, the inquest could not lay blame. Still, the 502-page report clearly documents a situation in which the surgeon was beyond his abilities.

Many of the parents say that if they had known that Odim had never performed similar surgeries unsupervised, they would never have allowed him to operate.

“My biggest hope is that everyone realizes that doctors are human,” Linde Feakes, whose 16-month-old son, Ashton, died 10 days after his open-heart surgery, told Reuters.