Hanoi hospital tells man to have his 'vagina' stitched up

By Staff reporters   October 30, 2017 | 08:33 pm PT
The patient decided the obstetrics department wasn't the place to go for an injured finger.

A public hospital in Hanoi has become notorious after telling a male patient he needed stitches in his vulva and vagina.

The patient, 34, visited Thach That General Hospital in its namesake district with an injured finger on Saturday.

He noticed the mistake and unsurprisingly decided not to go to the obstetrics department as instructed.

Local Facebookers picked up on the story when it was posted on Monday and created such hype that officials were forced to step in.

Vuong Trung Kien, the hospital director, said a nurse had made a mistake and clicked on the wrong type of injury while she was inputting the man's condition on her computer.

Hanoi’s health department has asked the hospital to punish the nurse in question.

In May, a 60-year-old man also received “normal pregnancy” results from a hospital in the southern province of An Giang after going for a check-up. Doctors later said there was a technical error and several patients had received the same result.

While these mistakes can be laughed off in a couple of days, many others are not so funny.

A man had the wrong leg operated on at leading Hanoi hospital Viet Duc in July 2016, and the same mistake happened to a six-year-old boy in the southern province of Vinh Long the year before.

Other people in Vietnam have also spent years struggling with stigma and discrimination after being mistakenly diagnosed with HIV.

 
 
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