Fox News, quoting an article from The Associated Press, reports:

The link/lead-in:

Hospital Brawl Leads to Botched Delivery

The article text: 

Operating Room Fistfight Leads to Botched Delivery
Monday, August 30, 2010 

MESSINA, Sicily —  Italy’s health minister traveled to Sicily on Monday to apologize to a new mother for an operating room fistfight between two doctors that led to her botched delivery.

Laura Salpietro, 30, had to have her uterus removed and her son Antonio suffered heart problems and possible brain damage following his birth Thursday in Messina’s public hospital, Italian news reports said.

Health officials and Salpietro’s husband, Matteo Molonia, say the two doctors disagreed about whether to perform a Caesarean section and came to blows while Salpietro was in labor. Molonia says the fight delayed the C-section by over an hour, leading to complications for mother and son.

Prosecutors have placed five doctors under investigation, and Health Minister Ferruccio Fazio visited Salpietro on Monday in the hospital to apologize.

OK, the lead-in says it was a “brawl.”  Make of that what you will regarding how many people it takes to qualify as a “brawl.”

Then, the article says  it was a “fistfight.”  Apparently it’s use-your-thesaurus-day in the newsroom.

The article goes on to say that two doctors were involved in the fistfight and the apology was for their behavior, but five doctors have been placed under investigation.  Two?  Five?  How many doctors were there in that operating room and how many did not take part in the brawl, fistfight, or whatever? 

“I tried to give her words of hope, and above all I tried to tell her that the government was with her and her family at this time,” Fazio was quoted as saying by the ANSA news agency.

The incident was the latest evidence of medical mishaps frequently reported in southern Italian hospitals. It also cast a fresh spotlight on their unusually high C-section rates: Some 38 percent of all births in Italy are done by C-section, more than twice the 15 percent recommended by the World Health Organization.

In Sicily, however, the average is 52 percent while Campania — the southern mainland region that includes Naples — it reaches 60 percent, Fazio noted.

Second paragraph — “mishaps”??????  Pardon me, but I somehow don’t find the word “mishap” quite descriptive, here, but that’s just me.  I mean, it’s not as if someone accidentally dropped a bottle on the floor and spilled its contents.

Fazio said the incident also raised questions about the increasing intermingling of private doctors working in public hospitals; in this case one of the dueling doctors was Salpietro’s private gynecologist who cared for her during her pregnancy while the other was the doctor on duty at the hospital.

Heh.  If I’m the patient and I’m given the choice between my doc, the one I chose and have been seeing repeatedly by my choice, versus the one who has probably never seen me and with whom I have no history or relationship, well, gang, I know which way I’m going.

Another point I’ll keep in mind for the evolution of Obamacare since we seem so eager to copy other countries’ health systems.