A Sydney hospital has admitted making mistakes in its handling of a doctor who under-prescribed chemotherapy drugs to cancer patients.
A report into St Vincent's Hospital oncologist Dr John Grygiel was scathing of the hospital's response to revelations he under-dosed 78 patients on carboplatin between 2012 and 2015.
The interim report, by an inquiry team, found most patients weren't told about until after the revelations were aired in a media report.
Public statements by the hospital were misleading and made key omissions and St Vincent's was slow to respond to concerns about Dr Grygiel, the inquiry team found.
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In response the hospital apologised to patients, their families and the public, and admitted to not living up to the "the high standards we set ourselves".
"We failed to appreciate the seriousness of the situation: early questions about the doctor's dosage practice should have led to a formal examination," St Vincent's said in a statement on Tuesday.
Twenty-three of Dr Grygiel's patients have since died of cancer, but the inquiry team was unable to attribute their deaths to under-dosing.
The report's authors warned the full extent of Dr Grygiel's prescribing was still unknown, and recommended expanding the inquiry's scope to include patients treated by him from as early as 2006.
