There Ferrara Prosecutor’s Office has again requested archiving for then director of the South-East district of the Ferrara Local Health Authority and for a 118 telephone operatorinitially investigated for manslaughter in relation to the death of Francesco D’Antoniwho died in Argenta on 20 March 2021 due to acute myocardial infarction.
The two ended up under the scrutiny of investigators with responsibility different. The first for having arranged that from March 18, 2021 – we are still in the midst of a pandemic and in the midst of a health crisis – the ambulance of Emergency room of Argenta it was no longer equipped with a doctor on boardadding that any red codes in the area would be instead managed by other medical vehicles present in the province. The second for not sending a medical emergency vehicle immediately after the telephone interview in which the patient complained of severe chest pain and dyspnea, and then that he could no longer breathe.
It was in fact who intervened at 11.19pm an ambulance with only one nursewho had no possibility of intervention, and who therefore required the arrival of a second vehicle with a doctor on board, who arrived on site at 11.46pm and confirmed his death (the ‘real’ time of death is dated approximately 11.20pm).
But even if it had arrived immediately, apparently, could not have changed the victim’s fate.
This was the conclusion to which, after a first technical consultancy, the prosecutor Ciro Alberto Savino – owner of the investigation file – had arrived and in September 2022 he had therefore asked the investigating judge to close the investigation. A request which the victim’s family opposed, prompting the judge for preliminary investigations to order further investigationswhich, however they did not change the decisions of the Prosecutor’s Office. There second consultation in fact, arranged in recent months by the offices in via Mentessi and carried out by the consultants Kusstatscher and Cecchetto, today substantially confirmed what had already been highlighted with the first.
Specifically, according to consultants, approximately 25 minutes ‘late’ in the correct rescue intervention, which had ended up at the center of the investigation, they would not however have been sufficient “to cover the space between the victim’s home and the Cona hospital, the nearest hospital equipped with a haemodynamics service (35.6 km away), and the subsequent subject to an urgent angiography, in time to save him.” Therefore, the Ferrara Prosecutor’s Office wrote, the man “he would have died in any case during the journey in the ambulance, even if an ambulance with a doctor on board arrives at your home. Unfortunately, it must be acknowledged that there is, therefore, no causal link between the death and the delay in rescue.”
“The patient – the prosecutor had also written, again on the basis of the technical consultant’s findings – could have been saved only through immediate transfer to a haemodynamics department, with emergency angiography performed, since all the remaining therapeutic treatments reported in literature and guidelines they would not have been saving“.
In short, even in the face of a perfect intervention by 118, D’Antoni would not have been saved because the largest, best-equipped hospital, the hub of provincial healthcare, it was too far away.
