The doctor at the centre of the baby death scandal at Bacchus Marsh Hospital has broken his silence, defending himself and other doctors who worked for him during a series of “catastrophic” failures.
In his first interview since the Victorian government revealed seven babies’ deaths could have been prevented in 2013 and 2014, Surinder Parhar?, the hospital’s former director of obstetrics, said he had been unfairly targeted and that he wanted to move on.
On Sunday, the former obstetrician said he had provided a service to the community for 35 years and that the doctors working under him had been competent. Despite dozens of families seeking legal advice about potentially inadequate care delivered under his watch, Dr Parhar said he and his team frequently reviewed things that went wrong to improve their practice and tried to manage high-risk women appropriately.
In response to criticism that the hospital was caring for women delivering babies at 34 weeks when they should have been transferring them to more specialist hospitals, Dr Parhar said sometimes it was too late to safely transfer them.
“We had a protocol; anything less than 34 weeks we would transfer. Thirty-four weeks was the borderline. Some were transferred, some we didn’t, it depended on the situation,” he said.
“Nobody wants to harm anybody. That goes against the grain for everybody in the profession. You do your best in the circumstances.”
In 2015, data revealing an unusual spike in stillbirths and neonatal deaths at the hospital triggered an investigation. On behalf of the government, leading obstetrician Euan Wallace examined the deaths and found a range of problems may have contributed to them.
Professor Wallace pointed to misuse and misinterpretation of fetal surveillance; inadequate staffing to support midwifery education; a lack of out-of-hours and emergency paediatric cover for neonatal resuscitation; and a lack of formal expert multidisciplinary review of deaths and injuries in the maternity unit.
“The clinical governance framework has not enabled the health service to monitor and respond to adverse clinical outcomes in a timely manner,” he wrote in an executive summary of the report.
In October, Victorian Health Minister Jill Hennessy described the deaths as a “catastrophic event”, and one of the government’s advisers, Professor Jeremy Oats, said there had been “a team issue”.
Dr Parhar said he did not want to comment on whether he had done anything wrong and when asked if he wanted to apologise for anything, he said: “I can’t really say anything … I really don’t know”.
When asked if the hospital had a lack of resources to cope with a near doubling of births between 2006 and 2013, Dr Parhar acknowledged the numbers had increased, but he did not highlight that as a problem.
He said nobody in the community had harassed him about the service’s failures, and that he wanted to move on.
“I have no issues, the community knows me very well,” he said.
While Dr Parhar allowed his medical registration to lapse in July, saying he wanted to retire, the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency is investigating him and an undisclosed number of other health professionals in response to Professor Wallace’s findings.
In 2013, AHPRA received a complaint about Dr Parhar, the details of which are unknown. The investigation took more than two years and Ms Hennessy said the Victorian Department of Health was not notified about it.
A review of deaths at Djerriwarrh Health Service prior to 2013 is being conducted by Professor Wallace. Its findings have not yet been made public.
By Julia Medew and Anna Whitelaw