He had to undergo a life-saving heart operation due to some post-surgery complications, but the operating rooms of the “Vito Fazzi” hospital were all occupied by scheduled operations and he died. And now the Lecce Local Health Authority will have to compensate the family members with over 600 thousand euros.
This is the verdict of the Civil Court of Lecce issued regarding the request for compensation for damages made by the relatives of a sixty-year-old from the province of Lecce, who died in 2015 a few days after undergoing cardiac surgery at Fazzi. While the criminal proceedings (in which the family members refused to take part in civil proceedings) ended with the acquittal of all the accused, the civil proceedings – on 7 May 2024 – saw the request for compensation for damages proposed by the widow and her parents accepted. children of the deceased patient, assisted by the lawyers Alessandra De Benedittis and Riccardo Renna.
The Lecce judge Caterina Stasi, in fact, recognized a serious responsibility due to organizational negligence, deeming the patient’s death unjustifiablehospitalized in a highly specialized department such as cardiac surgery, without the availability of operating rooms for emergencies: «If certain operating rooms are occupied for the execution of scheduled operations – it is written in the sentence – they must be reserved, i.e. free and ready for ‘also use, to a reasonable extent, operating rooms for the treatment of possible emergencies, especially since, in this case, the requested service was requested from the main hospital in the Salento capital, with a catchment area of hundreds of people.’
