SINGAPORE — A clinic and two doctors who performed liposuction on the head of a property management firm before he died were fined by the State Courts yesterday, after it emerged that they had failed to follow proper procedures for several other patients.

The Ministry of Health began investigating the death of Franklin Heng in 2010 after the 44-year-old died while undergoing liposuction at Reves Clinic on Dec 30, 2009.

In 2012, the ministry lodged complaints against the two doctors with the Singapore Medical Council (SMC) and the case was eventually brought before the courts.

Wong Meng Hang, 38, and Zhu Xiu Chun, 51, were fined a total of S$26,000 and S$8,000, respectively, while Reves Clinic, which has since been renamed Yume Aesthetic & Medical Clinic, was fined S$60,000 for allowing Wong and Zhu to perform liposuction without the presence of a registered nurse or an assistant with the relevant training and experience in an operating theatre.

Although the two general practitioners were banned from performing liposuction after Heng’s death — the first recorded fatality caused by an aesthetic treatment here — they renamed their clinic and continued to offer aesthetic treatments to other patients.

Among other offences, both doctors were fined for failing to allow a seven-day cooling-off period for patients seeking liposuction and for failing to obtain post-discharge patient feedback while they were practising at TLC @ Orchard Clinic.

After the clinic ceased operations on Sept 10, 2009, the two doctors moved to Reves Clinic, where they were registered as directors.

Court documents showed Wong had failed to obtain post-discharge feedback from 20 patients, three months after they received treatment between December 2008 and June 2009. Zhu failed to do the same between November 2008 and August 2009 with three patients.

Regulations stipulate that during the cooling-off period, no payment should be collected and treatment cannot be carried out. Yet, Wong collected deposits from five patients seeking liposuction on the first day of their consultation between December 2008 and June 2009.

Likewise, Zhu breached regulations when she performed liposuction on a patient within a week of the first consultation in May 2009.

Court documents revealed that Wong had performed the procedure on 10 patients, including Heng, between October and December 2009. Zhu performed the procedure on eight patients between November and December 2009.

When asked by TODAY if the SMC would be taking additional measures against the two doctors, the council would only say that its policy is “not to comment on any queries regarding any possible complaints or disciplinary issues pertaining to a registered medical practitioner”.

Previously, when it was asked about Wong and Zhu, SMC reportedly said it could “only comment on cases which have concluded and where the doctor has been convicted of the charge(s) brought against him”.

The doctors are now embroiled in a civil suit and face claims of more than S$1 million from the estate of Heng, who was divorced with two children. The two threw in the towel at a pre-trial conference in August 2012, but the amount of the compensation has yet to be fixed.

In his 63-page findings released in January 2012, the State Coroner found Heng suffocated because too much anaesthesia had been administered during the treatment. An earlier autopsy found that Wong, who performed the liposuction with the assistance of Zhu, had accidentally punctured Heng’s intestines 13 times during the procedure.

Last year, Mandy Yeong, also 44, died as a result of liposuction at the TCS at Central Clinic. A coroner’s inquiry convened in April ruled that her death was a misadventure. Yeong had undergone the procedure to use the fat from her abdomen to smoothen the depressions in her thighs. Her treatment at the clinic was meant to last two hours, from noon till 2pm, but the staff stopped keeping records on her case at 2.05pm. When the surgery ended, Yeong sat up, coughed a few times and collapsed.