Liposuction death: Family seeks $3.5m from docs, clinic

The family of real estate firm boss Franklin Heng, who died after he was given too much anaesthesia during a liposuction procedure, is claiming at least $3.5 million from the two doctors and the clinic involved in the operation.

Get the full story from The Straits Times.

Liposuction clinic fined $60,000 for breaking law
By Elena Chong
The Straits Times
Tuesday, June 21, 2014

A clinic where a 44-year-old man underwent a liposuction operation and died later was fined a total of $60,000 yesterday for breaking the law.

Reves Clinic, located at International Building in Orchard Road and now called Yume Aesthetic & Medical Clinic, pleaded guilty to six charges in the State Courts under the Private Hospitals and Medical Clinics Act.

Four of them involved letting Jim Wong Meng Hang, 38, carry out liposuction on patients without the presence of a registered nurse or an assistant with the relevant training and experience in an operating theatre.

The remaining two accused Zhu Xiu Chun alias Myint Myint Kyi, 51, of the same offence.

Both doctors were directors of the clinic.

The man who died was Mr Franklin Heng, chief executive of property management company YTL Pacific Star,who collapsed at the clinic during the procedure on Dec 30, 2009. He was taken to the A&E department of Tan Tock Seng Hospital and pronounced dead on arrival.

Yesterday, Wong was fined $26,000 and Zhu, $18,000, for failing to give patients who underwent liposuction a seven- day cooling-off period and to get patient feedback three months after the treatment.

The offences were committed at TLC @ Orchard Clinic, which the two doctors were running before they closed it in September 2009 and opened Reves.

Wong, the licensee and clinic manager of TLC that was at Far East Shopping Centre, pleaded guilty to eight charges while Zhu admitted to two charges.

In the cooling-off period, no payment should be collected and treatment cannot be carried out.

But Wong had collected deposits for the procedure from the patients on the day of their first consultation.

As for Zhu, she carried out liposuction on a patient on the first day of consultation in May 2009.

The court heard that more than three months after their liposuction procedures, the patients returned to TLC for other procedures. Wong had no records showing he got feedback from them.

The lawyer for Reves Clinic, Mr Tan Beng Swee, said in mitigation that other than Mr Heng who died from complications, none of the other five cases had complaints.

Zhu's lawyer S. Selvaraj said his client, who had donated to the Kidney Dialysis Foundation and Red Cross for the 2011 tsunami victims in Japan, had suffered an ordeal from the embarrassment following newspaper reports of her case.

elena@sph.com.sg