The surgeon stepped in to perform an operation after two clinicians were called to an emergency (Picture: Getty)
A surgeon in Germany has been sacked after asking a cleaner to hold a patient’s leg while he amputated their toe.
The doctor, who worked at a university hospital in Mainz, Frankfurt Rhine-Main, performed the operation in 2020.
The hospital, the University Medical Center Mainz of the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, has since fired him, the local daily Mainzer Allgemeine Zeitung reported.
The hospital’s chief executive, Norbert Pfeiffer, said the patient was set to have a routine toe amputation with two surgeons scheduled for it.
When both were called to the emergency room, a third doctor stepped in despite there being no qualified assistants on hand to help.
Wrongly going ahead with the operation anyway, the partially anaesthetised patient became restless.
So the surgeon called over a cleaner and asked her to hold the patient’s leg down.
She was also asked to hand him surgical instruments, Südwestrundfunk (SWR), a southwest Germany broadcaster, reported.
Hospital staff apologised for the incident, adding that the doctor was given the boot in 2021 (Picture: Getty Images)
‘The patient was not harmed,’ the university told Allgemeine, adding that they suffered no complications.
According to an internal letter seen by the newspaper, the incident became known to university officials in October 2020 when the operating room manager spotted the cleaner holding bloody gauze pads in the operating theatre.
The manager said the cleaner was not medically trained and that surgical tools were not accounted for after the surgery.
She said: ‘After the operation, the room was simply left behind with bloody tables and we organised the cleaning up later.’
‘What happened to the operated limb and whether it was disposed of correctly is also beyond my knowledge,’ the manager added.
The doctor was given a warning before being fired in 2021, the outlets reported.
State health officials said the incident was ‘very regrettable and ‘should not be repeated’.
The procedure, a spokesperson for the Rhineland-Palatinate Ministry of Health told Allgemeine, was a ‘clear violation of existing regulations’.
‘This never should have happened,’ the German news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH (dpa) quoted Pfeiffer as saying.
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Hospital chiefs have no clue what happened to the toe.
