One of the two patients given too much chemotherapy drugs at the KK Women's and Children's Hospital (KKH), Mrs L K Ng, 51, was discharged yesterday.

The other patient, Mrs Yip Poh Hung, 44, is in stable condition. "We'll go all out to make sure she can achieve full recovery, if it's possible, and the doctor seems reasonably confident of that," Health Minister Khaw Boon Wan said yesterday.

He had sent an email to KKH after reading in the newspapers that the husband of one of them had asked for leniency for the hospital staff responsible. Mr Khaw said he told the hospital to "be fair" to this "very fair and decent patient and family".

The top priority now is to give the patients the "best of care" and to ensure similar mistakes are not repeated, he said. Disciplinary action is a "secondary step", as investigations are underway and the staff involved are "very personally traumatised".

But it was unlikely that "a case of worker fatigue" had led to the pharmacists wrongly calibrating the patients' infusion pumps. The hospital uses two types of pumps, one calibrated in hours and the other in days. "From the pictures I see, the pumps look almost exactly the same," said Mr Khaw, "so we're feeding back to the manufacturer that this is very dangerous". ALICIA WONG