Ravenna, 15 June 2024 – He was found in a ditch, lost and cold, on November 20, 2022, two days after leaving the emergency room in Ravenna where he had been taken by ambulance, after his family found him at home in a confused state.
Brought back to hospital, his condition worsened suddenly, until his death on 7 December due to thehypothermia And pneumonia resulting from those two nights spent out in the open in the middle of winter.
For the death of a 67-year-old man, the two ambulance nurses who transported him to Santa Maria delle Croci and the triage nurse who took in charge of the patient, not realizing his departure, allegedly due to overcrowding.
The investigating judge, Janos Barlotti, ordered an expert opinion on evidentiary matters, entrusted to the medical examiner Donatella Fedeli.
According to the expert’s conclusions, against the 118 nurse and driver – defended by the lawyers Giovanni Scudellari and Eleonora Raggi – it is not possible to detect behavior that differs from the correct reference practices, as the patient has been entrusted to the triage operator. On the contrary, it remains to be ascertained whether the latter (protected by the lawyer Laura Bozzi) acted correctly or not. And in any case, everything happened in a context that already at the time showed, in the Ravenna hospital structure, problems of overcrowding and organizational deficiencies, as observed by the consultants of the Public Prosecutor and one of the defences.
The lawyers Giovanni Scudellari and Eleonora Raggi, who defend two suspects
At the time of the first visit to the emergency room, at 1.30 pm on 18 November, the patient was in a state of confusion and his situation was classified by the triage operator as a “deferrable emergency”, i.e. a “code blue“ which involves a maximum waiting time of one hour. The patient was instead called after two hours and a half and when, according to witnesses, he had moved away.
Hence the accusation of one negligent conduct generic attribute attributed to the triage doctor, i.e. having delayed the patient’s visit, not ensuring that he received constant supervision, nor re-evaluating the waiting time despite the state of confusion he was in.
The public prosecutor’s consultant, Matteo Tudini, observes that “the monitoring should have been careful by the triage” and “the lack of supervision in this case is to be considered reprehensible in relation to the subject’s conditions”.
Then he notes two aspects: on the one hand that “the delay could depend on organizational problems”, in an emergency room where as many as 49 patients were present at that moment, on the other that “the delay is however acceptable” precisely by virtue of that congestion. According to the appointed defense consultant of the triage operatorGiuseppe Venturini, the emergency room was “in overcrowded conditions” so it was impossible to “respect the acceptance and re-evaluation times of the numerous patients”.
The family members, that day, they had not been able to follow the man to the emergency room: the son because he was feverish like his grandchildren, the daughter-in-law for work reasons. Around 4pm they had been alerted by the hospital to the disappearance of their relative and, having not returned home that day, the next day a missing person report was filed at the police station, with searches involving volunteers and the outcome of which seemed comforting. The family is now protected by the lawyer Enrico De Crescenzo Costi, who attributes negligent responsibility for what happened to all three doctors under investigation, as the poor conditions of that man, already hospitalized in the past, should have required maximum attention and instead “for hours he had been abandoned to himself in the First Aid rooms”.
