Family members and relatives of Rampiyari Thapa Magar have alleged that sheer negligence on the part of the medical team of Om Hospital and Research Center Pvt Ltd caused Magar’s death.

Magar, 50, a resident of Indrawati Rural Municipality of Sindhupalchok, had undergone a gallbladder surgery. She died at 7am on Thursday.

According to Magar’s brother-in-law Khadga Shrestha, she had visited the hospital a week earlier to seek treatment for back pain. After some tests, the doctors at the hospital confirmed multiple stones in her gallbladder and advised a surgery to remove them. Her surgery was scheduled for Friday, June 7.

Post-surgery, her family members were informed that the surgery was successful. But Magar’s condition deteriorated the next day.

Dr Rabin Koirala, the surgeon who conducted the surgery, asked Magar to undergo another round of tests including a CT-scan. The tests did not reveal anything out of the ordinary, according to Dr KP Devkota, Hospital Medical Director. But Magar’s condition worsened and she was shifted to the Intensive Care Unit on Saturday evening.

The next day, the doctors opened her stitches to check her wound for possible signs of infection. The wound, they found, was filled with pus.

The doctors say they immediately informed Magar’s family members about the infection and told them that the patient will have to undergo another surgery to treat a hole found in her intestine. In the second surgery, the doctors removed about one and a half metre of her intestine that was infected.

“The doctors should have taken care of the hole in her intestine during the first surgery itself. The wound got infected because of the open hole,” Shrestha alleged. “Rampiyari died because of infection in her intestine.”

Devkota conceded that the surgeons discovered the hole in Magar’s intestine only on Sunday and that they rushed her to the Operation Theatre for another surgery immediately.

“There was no negligence on our part,” claimed Devkota. “The surgery was complicated, and we have shared every piece of information about the patient’s condition since the time of her hospitalisation to her family.”

According to Devkota, the patient had already had three surgeries, and that her gallbladder was covered by a large part of her intestine.

“There was no bleeding, no holes left during the surgery, and the surgeons were confident about the success of the surgery,” he added. “We tried all available antibiotics to control the infection but they didn’t work. The patient died due to the infection.”

The family members and relatives of the patient refused to receive the patient’s dead body until Thursday evening. “We do not know much, but we do know that we lost our family member due to the negligence of the doctors, the medical team and the hospital. We want a fair investigation into this matter from concerned authorities,” said Shrestha.