Doubts cast on doctor's ability to manage celebrity couple's baby

A paediatrician whose newborn charge, the son of a celebrity couple, died a day after birth in 2005 was incapable of handling the baby, the chairwoman of a medical disciplinary panel said.

Dr Wan Kam-ming is accused of failing to move the critically ill child soon enough from St Teresa's Hospital in Kowloon City to Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Yau Ma Tei, where neonatal intensive care equipment was better.

Instead, he let Cheung Tin-lam - son of singer Peter Cheung Shung-tak and former actress Eugina Lau Mei-kuen - remain in the private hospital even when the nurses did not give him timely data about the boy's low blood pressure and failure to urinate, the Medical Council heard.

Yesterday, the council's temporary chairwoman, Professor Felice Lieh Mak, asked why Wan did not arrange for a transfer, since St Teresa's lacked some of the equipment that would have helped the baby and the nurses were "not very competent".

"I put to you that you were incapable of managing the baby," she said.

Wan testified he had balanced the risks of a transferral as the ambulance did not have a ventilator, which the baby needed. He also said blood pressure readings were sometimes misleading.

The doctor was found to have left St Teresa's twice that day, the second time after ordering a transfusion. "When a blood transfusion was being given to the baby, you had to be there to observe it," Lieh Mak said. "You can't run off to your clinic."