An orthopaedic surgeon has been suspended after threatening to hunt down a team member and “piss in [their] mouth” when a non-sterile drape almost fell into a patient’s wound.

The Melbourne surgeon was also disqualified over his online abuse of two psychiatrists he claimed wrongly diagnosed him with bipolar disorder.

The Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal heard that the incident in the operating theatre occurred in October 2017 during elbow revision surgery, which was complicated because the patient had undergone at least 10 other elbow procedures.

By the time the “embedded” elbow implant was removed, the surgeon had been at the hospital for 10.5 hours.