Doctor who gave one-year-old baby wrong vaccine is reprimanded
Paediatrician reprimanded after one-year-old boy given booster shot he had already received months earlier, instead of Hepatitis A vaccine
A paediatrician has been issued a warning letter and reprimanded by the Medical Council for injecting a one-year-old child with the wrong vaccine.
Dr Lau Mang-kaw, who practises in Tuen Mun, was found guilty of professional misconduct after the council heard the child was given a pneumococcal booster shot when a Hepatitis A vaccine had been requested.
Lau was also found to have failed to properly address the mother's concern about the effects of a repeat dose of vaccine.
The patient was taken by his mother, Ms Lee, to receive a Hepatitis A vaccine in Lau's clinic on September 20, 2011. But when the immunisation record was returned to his mother, she discovered that her son had been given a pneumococcal vaccine of which he had received a booster dose three months earlier.
When the mother asked the clinic if there would be any adverse effect from the extra dose, a woman in plain clothes, who turned out to be the doctor's wife, told Lee that it would not cause any harm to her son.
A follow-up email was sent to the customer service division of the medical group to which Lau belonged, but no reply was received until late 2013.
The Medical Council said it was "certainly not good enough" for Lau to let a person without a medical qualification tell Lee not to worry about the extra dose.