The daughter of a man who died after undergoing surgery by Jayant Patel has testified at the doctor’s manslaughter trial in Brisbane.

Patel, 59, the former chief of surgery at Bundaberg hospital, has pleaded not guilty to unlawfully killing three patients and causing grievous bodily harm to a fourth.

One of his alleged victims was Mervyn Morris, 75, who died three weeks after surgery in 2003 from a combination of factors including malnutrition.

His daughter Vicki Whitfield has testified at Patel’s Supreme Court trial about her father’s deteriorating health after the operation.

Ms Whitfield told the court she spoke to Patel about his plan to perform the major bowel operation.

“I asked him if he could possibly be bleeding from anywhere else, maybe the liver? He said ‘no’,” she said.

“He wanted to do a bowel resection. We thought that was pretty dramatic.

“We asked if that would stop the bleeding and he said ‘yes’.”

Patel allegedly told Ms Whitfield her father would be out of hospital in a week.

Instead, Mr Morris died an undignified death three weeks later, vomiting faeces that were aspirated into his lungs in his final hours.

Ms Whitfield told the court her father had been unable to eat after the operation, so she had asked Patel if she could bring him energy-rich drinks.

But he got worse, so she said she made another suggestion to Patel.

“We asked him, ‘could he have a feed tube?’ He couldn’t drink the Sustagen, he was really struggling,” she said.

She told the court, Patel agreed about the feeding tube.

“Dr Patel also said that he thought Dad would have been better by now,” she said.

“He thought he would have been over it in a couple of days but because of his age he wasn’t coping with it very well.”

The court has heard that along with the operation itself, poor post-operative nutrition was also listed on Mr Morris’s death certificate as a causal factor.

But Ms Whitfield told the court that when she raised concerns that her father’s feeding tube was not working properly, Patel pulled it out of his nose a bit and was optimistic it would be OK.

On the morning her father died, Ms Whitfield told the court: “I asked Dr Patel, ‘how come it’s got to this point that my father is in the ICU?’

“‘[He] looks like he’s dying, how did it get this bad?’”

She said Patel replied: “When I was putting the tube down, your father was vomiting, so he would have got some into his lungs. But we’ve given him some medication to fix that.”

The prosecution says Patel performed unnecessary and negligent surgery at a hospital not equipped to handle such major operations.

The trial has heard x-ray services were so lacking at the hospital that some reports were not available until after one of Patel’s patients had died.

Dr Emma Igras worked under Patel at the hospital in 2003.

Under cross-examination this morning from Patel’s counsel, Dr Igras told the court that during her time at the hospital, radiology services were “absent at times, delayed often”.

The court was shown a number of x-ray documents that showed there were long delays before doctors received reports from radiologists about their patients’ diagnostic x-ray pictures.

In one instance it was more than two months.

The court has also heard that Patel had restrictions placed on his licence in the US because of gross negligence, but staff at Bundaberg were unaware of this.

Patel has been quiet throughout the trial.

He enters court each morning holding his wife’s hand and does not respond to any questions from reporters.

The trial continues.