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IT WAS “a great pity” the parents of a child weren’t properly listened to when they asked staff at Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin, Dublin, to double check which kidney their son was to have removed, the child’s consultant surgeon said yesterday.

Prof Martin Corbally told a Medical Council fitness-to-practise inquiry that he, his surgical team and the hospital had “failed” the child and his family after the wrong kidney was removed in March 2008. The boy was left with a 9 per cent functioning right kidney.