Cardiologist to consider legal action against P.M.

Press, 14 October 1986, Page 1

Cardiologist to consider legal action against P.M.

By

DAVID CLARKSON

and PA

The Wellington cardiologist, Dr Richard Thompson, is threatening legal action against the Prime Minister, Mr Lange, after being accused of “a conspiracy of silence” over a planned heart transplant in Wellington.

“At best it is unhelpful. At worst it is libellous,” Dr Thompson said, after hearing of Mr Lange’s comments. He will discuss the matter today with the other doctor involved, the cardiothoracic surgeon, Mr Alan Hilless, to decide what action to take. The Government last week offered a Wellington man aged 50, a $40,000 grant to have heart transplant surgery in Sydney after plans for the Wellington operation were scrapped. The row began when publicity about the planned operation leaked out, and it deepened yesterday when Mr Lange admitted he was angry about the incident. He said he was not embarrassed.

Both Mr Lange and the Minister of Health, Dr Bassett have emphasised that although the patient

was diagnosed as needing a heart transplant at the end of August, no application for Government assistance was received until last Tuesday — six weeks later. The Press Association reported Mr Lange as saying: “I felt it was wrong in prinicple for a man who was deemed to be mortally ill on August 29, whose only remedy was to have a new heart, but they had a conspiracy of silence to shut up about that... until they could perform it in Wellington themselves.” Mr Lange said every justification the man’s medical advisers had had for that silence had gone by the board. He discounted the suggestion that the silence might have been because of a fear of publicity, pointing out that he had seen a front-page photograph of the patient during the week-end. “I’m not-: embarrassed about helping to save the life of a person whose medical• ■ advisers kept him, • if you. like, in the symbolic cooler for a while until they could wheel him out and become ... the Christiaan Barnard of Porirua or Wadestown,” he said. “I find these comments absolutely extraordinary,” Dr Thompson told "The Press” from Wellington last evening. “He has gone over the top, quite honestly.” “If Mr Lange watches television or reads the newspapers he will be well aware that the reason for delay in this case was that the patient and the relatives did not feel they could sustain the

necessary public campaign to raise funds. “The patient was well aware he could get a Government subsidy of between $lO,OOO and $20,000,” he said. But $BO,OOO was needed. That was out of. reach considering the amount the patient earned, and he had no home he could mortgage. “Like many of the patients we are seeing now, he did not want to involve himself in this humiliating bunfight for public funds. “I have a patient, a woman of 39, who has refused cardiac transplantation because she does not want to have all her affairs aired in public.”

“Mr Hilless had a letter today from a wife of a 45-year-old man outside Wellington who is lying dying in hospital. He would rather do that than submit to the humiliation of seeking public funds.

“For a Prime Miniser to say that we had hidden this man away in a cupboard is preposterous,” Dr Thompson said.