The Braga hospital, a surgeon and an insurance company were ordered to pay jointly 132 thousand euros to the parents of a 33-year-old man who died almost a month after undergoing surgery in that hospital unit.
The sentence of the Braga Court of April 10 revealed, this Monday, April 13, by the Lusa agency also says that the surgeon was acquitted of the crime of medical-surgical interventions and treatments, which is committed when there is no consent from the patient, which according to the court did not happen.
The facts are from July 19, 2021, when the patient underwent surgery to remove the entire colon and rectum. The man died on August 16 due to complications that began to occur four days after surgery.
The patient developed an abscess, and the surgical team requested percutaneous drainage from the Radiology Service, which would never happen, having continued to take a broad-spectrum antibiotic.
After 21 days, the antibiotic was changed but the patient died shortly afterwards, with the death certificate stating that the cause of death was sepsis with multiorgan dysfunction.
To the court, the surgeon, in the postoperative period, did not take appropriate measures in a timely manner to resolve the complications that arose, “which constitutes bad medical practice and a violation of the laws of art“. “In fact, the abscess diagnosed by CT scan was not drained, even though this drainage was mandatory and would probably prevent the worsening of the clinical picture”, the sentence reads.
The judge says that the defendant did not take due diligence to timely control the septic focus, “contributing to the unfavorable outcome that occurred.” “There are several ways to control sepsis, It is not good practice to wait multiple days without taking a more proactive attitude to achieve control and avoid septic shock“, adds the sentence, which also says that the attempted solution would only occur with the intervention carried out approximately three weeks after the complication was detected “and at a time when the patient’s degradation, in septic shock and organ failure, was practically irreversible”.
“Failure to adopt the aforementioned measures in a timely manner worsened, or at least did not alleviate, the patient’s clinical condition, representing an increase in risk, although it cannot be guaranteed with complete certainty that the outcome would be different, given the patient’s serious clinical situation, the prognosis of the disease and the complexity of the surgical intervention”says the sentence.
For the court, if the defendant had complied with the the laws of artadopting medical procedures appropriate to the patient’s clinical condition, the chances of survival would be around 60%.
In the defense he presented in the process, the surgeon denied the facts of the accusation, immediately claiming that this was the surgery that is associated with a higher rate of complications. He added that the surgical risk increased with the presence of the patient’s comorbidities, who had oncological pathology.
For the surgeon, there has been the development, in recent days, of resistance to the established antibiotic.
As he claimed, the request for percutaneous drainage of the abscess was made, but it has not been scientifically proven that patients undergoing that treatment have better clinical results than patients undergoing treatment with antibiotic therapy.
He also said that the Radiology Service “had an obligation” to have carried out the drainage or, at least, to inform the surgical team of its unavailability to carry it out.
Even so, the surgeon said that there is no evidence that any other procedure that had been adopted would have changed the patient’s fatal outcome.
In its response, the Local Health Unit (ULS) of Braga also challenged the request for civil compensation for everything that puts at risk the assistance and medical acts carried out by its health professionals, especially by the defendant.
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