The death of Piotr Piskozub, at the age of 23, on October 2, 2013, in a municipal shelter in Seville, a few hours after his release from the hospital and while he was waiting in line to receive food, focused on health care for homeless people and asked the Government of Andalusia to update the framework procedure for assisting people at social risk in the event of a hospital emergency. After this death remained unpunished from a criminal point of view in 2016, a contentious-administrative court approved the compensation of 6,000 euros that the Andalusian Health Service had decided to grant to his relatives for moral damage and whose administrative procedure is closed . . Of course, in her sentence, the judge says that when the young Pole was taken to Virgen del Rocío, his condition “required tests” which “were not carried out”.
The judgment underlines in any case that “even if the aforementioned diagnostic tests had been carried out and the disease had been diagnosed earlier, the fatal outcome would have occurred”, concluding that “there is no need to speak loss of chance”, because this has not been proven. “the probability that medical action would have prevented death”, since he suffered from pneumonia and tuberculosis.
The judgment specifies that “following the examination carried out, according to which the patient’s condition required examinations, at least a biochemical blood count and a chest x-ray, and that these examinations were not carried out, it is the only thing which should be the subject of compensation, since there, it is insisted, does not apply the doctrine of loss of chance, which requires as a presupposition that the medical act deprived the patient of certain expectations of recovery or survival The SAS has already acknowledged that “not all available additional tests have been carried out which, in one way or another, would have facilitated the diagnosis of the pathology which contributed to his. death”, which, on the other hand, was “inevitable”, they declared.
“Clinical Judgment: Social Problems”
The judge ruled that “even if the examinations had been carried out on the patient, if the diagnosis of the pathology from which he suffered had been made and if the treatment had been administered, the patient would have died.” The owner relies on the statement of the forensic doctors, on the opinion of the Consultative Council of Andalusia and on a witness who declared that he could affirm with 99.99% that the patient would have died even with adequate treatment. The judgment says that Piotr’s family expert was the “only one” to admit the possibility of survival with adequate treatment but that “he could not give a survival percentage, recognizing that the patient was very deteriorated “.
The family can still appeal to the court and to the Contentious-Administrative Chamber of the Superior Court of Justice of Andalusia. “It is not normal that a 23-year-old boy dies in a shelter 12 hours after leaving the hospital. “If he had died in a hospital surrounded by professional care, we would not have complained and we would have had the certainty that everything possible had been done from a medical point of view,” commented the brother of the young man, Robert Piskozub. .elDiario.es Andalusia.
“Clinical judgment: social problems,” said his discharge report from the emergency room at Virgen del Rocío Hospital that morning, just twelve hours before his death. The doctor assigned to the Advisory and Risk Service who submitted her proposed resolution to the SAS estimated that during the two hours she was in the hospital, there was “a lack of additional tests that could have helped with the diagnosis of the pathology that could have ultimately contributed to the patient’s death”, highlighting his “problems communicating in Spanish” and that he “refused to be explored”, as well as “focused his claim on his social problems “, but finding “the arguments presented in the claim justified.” by his family.
Archives of the Court of Seville
From a criminal point of view, in September 2016, the Court of Seville confirmed in its entirety an order issued by the Court of Instruction 5 of Seville, rejecting the appeal filed by the young man’s family. The court maintained, as requested by the prosecution and confirmed by the court, the non-existence of an illegal act of medical imprudence on the part of the three doctors and the nurse of the Virgen del Rocío hospital who is under investigation. The accusation referred to crimes of homicide due to serious recklessness.
The court judges relied on the final autopsy report which concluded that the homeless Polish man had died of pneumonia and tuberculosis, and ruled that they had not detected “reckless conduct” in the accused evaluable in the criminal field because (…) the death of Pietr Piskozub would also have occurred in the hours following his hospitalization in the emergency room, even if his illness had been diagnosed and he had been admitted to the medical center.
Regardless, this order stated that “although the defendant’s actions were not entirely correct, since the necessary tests were omitted to arrive at an accurate diagnosis, resulting in a violation of the duty of care, there was not, however, a causal relationship with the end result, i.e. the death of the patient. The family filed a complaint with the SAS in February 2017, which was resolved. has now been resolved to the detriment of the desire to appeal to the courts Although the SAS resolution arrived more than five years after the complaint, the resolution period is six months, in accordance with article 91.3 of Law 39/. 2015.
The family had estimated that, as the SAS has now admitted, “no test was carried out even though he was very malnourished and weighed around 30 kilos, as indicated in the release report”. Piotr Piskozub died, according to the autopsy, from pneumococcal and S. Aureus pneumonia in a patient with miliary tuberculosis affecting the lungs, liver and kidneys. His lungs together weighed 1,760 grams when the normal weight would be 750 to 800 grams, which indicated that there was “disease or infection.”
