Call for Hospital Authority probe into how 'basic' work of calibrating machine could go wrong

Patient advocacy groups want to know how staff members at Tuen Mun Hospital could have erred in such a basic duty as calibrating a machine based on normal gender measurements and failed to realise the mistake until two years later.

They raised concerns after the Hospital Authority and the public hospital admitted yesterday that almost 10,000 patients were affected by the medical blunder.

Hospital employees mixed up the normal enzyme ranges for the sexes when they installed the machine in 2013, entering the male range for women and the female range for men.

An investigative committee set up by the authority is expected to submit a report with recommendations within eight weeks.

"From this incident, we see our medical system can err in what we all think is very basic and affects so many people," Patients' Rights Association spokesman Tim Pang Hung-cheong said. "Although the impact on patients' treatment may not be very big, we just cannot accept [medical workers] mixing up such a basic thing as gender."

The wrong calibrations led to erroneous interpretations of patients' enzyme readings based on the opposite sex's normal levels.

This had put 4,634 men at risk of missing out on needed treatment and possibly led to 4,809 women getting extra treatment.