A surgeon in Germany was fired after requesting a cleaner to support the leg of a patient as he severed their toe.
In 2020, the procedure was carried out by a doctor who practised at a university hospital in Mainz, Frankfurt Rhine-Main.
He was later sacked by the hospital, the University Medical Centre Mainz of the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, according to the regional newspaper Mainzer Allgemeine Zeitung.
The hospital’s chief executive, Norbert Pfeiffer, said the patient was set to have a routine toe amputation with two surgeons scheduled for it.
When both were called to the emergency room, a third doctor stepped in despite there being no qualified assistants on hand to help.
Wrongly going ahead with the operation anyway, the partially anaesthetised patient became restless.
So the surgeon called over a cleaner and asked her to hold the patient’s leg down.
She was also asked to hand him surgical instruments, Südwestrundfunk (SWR), a southwest Germany broadcaster, reported.
‘The patient was not harmed,’ the university told Allgemeine, adding that they suffered no complications.
According to an internal letter seen by the newspaper, the incident became known to university officials in October 2020 when the operating room manager spotted the cleaner holding bloody gauze pads in the operating theatre.
The manager said the cleaner was not medically trained and that surgical tools were not accounted for after the surgery.
She said: ‘After the operation, the room was simply left behind with bloody tables and we organised the cleaning up later.’
‘What happened to the operated limb and whether it was disposed of correctly is also beyond my knowledge,’ the manager added.
The doctor was given a warning before being fired in 2021, the outlets reported.
State health officials said the incident was ‘very regrettable and ‘should not be repeated’.
The procedure, a spokesperson for the Rhineland-Palatinate Ministry of Health told Allgemeine, was a ‘clear violation of existing regulations’.
‘This never should have happened,’ the German news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH (dpa) quoted Pfeiffer as saying.