Doctors were aware conjoined twins shared bowels

Dr Frank Serebour, a pediatrician at the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital, has refuted claims that doctors did not know the conjoined twins shared bowels prior to the surgery last week.

The twins died barely 48 hours after a team of 17 surgeons separated them in an operation that lasted about 12 hours.

The pediatrician was reported to have said that doctors did not know that the conjoined twins shared some intestines.

“At a point we were even struggling to know whether they had the same bowels or separate bowels and I think at surgery they realised that there were some bowels that were being shared,” he was quoted as saying.

But speaking on Joy FM’s Super Morning Show Monday, Dr Serebour said “somebody picks just portions of” that interview and “mixed the headlines,” to give a negative reportage of what he said.

He said even though he was in constant touch with the surgeons who operated on the twins, “I was not present during the surgery” and could not have said some of the things that were attributed to him.

“I was not at the surgery so it was very difficult for me to say that at surgery this is what was actually seen at surgery. I was speaking from the point of the pre-surgical investigation that was done so not the surgical findings,” he stated.

The General Secretary of the Ghana Medical Association (GMA) explained that “some of the things that we did was to try and investigate to ensure that they are not sharing bowel and the geological investigation was a little bit difficult to indicate whether they were sharing bowel or not".

The hospital, Dr Serebour said, is currently conducting a mortality audit – which includes a postmortem - to ascertain the cause of death of the twins and urged the general public to wait for the audit.

Dr Sodzi Sodzi Tetteh, Vice President of the Ghana Medical Association (GMA)speaking on the matter said he spoke to the pediatric surgeon who said “there was nothing they found in theatre that they didn’t know before going in".

He added that the surgeons said they had done extensive investigations on the twins for three months, after they were born in November 2012 before proceeding with the surgery.