The Hospital Authority is being sued for more than HK$10 million for alleged negligence by its surgeons during surgery to correct two congenital heart defects that left a baby boy unable to move his feet.
Irene Tang Oi-lin is seeking the damages after her son was diagnosed with a spinal cord injury as a result of blood deficiency after two operations at Grantham Hospital.
The second was performed to cut a ligature inserted during the first operation.
Ms Tang failed yesterday in an application for an interim payment of HK$1.64 million, with Mr Justice Anselmo Reyes saying that the hospital's liability was 'far from a foregone conclusion'.
The court heard that the boy, born in 1998, had extensive surgery on May 26, 1999, to close a hole between the left and right ventricles and to rectify a condition in which a duct that supplies blood to the fetus fails to close after birth.
The team was led by Cheng Lik-cheung, the chief of service of the hospital's cardiothoracic surgery department, assisted by Jan Lee, then a senior consultant specialising in paediatric cardiac surgery.