Professor Severino Iesu and his team have been acquitted, the team that, together with Professor Di Benedetto, made Salerno cardiac surgery famous at a national level. The judge for preliminary investigations at the Court of Salerno, Valeria Campanile, has closed the proceedings for the death of a patient, an event that occurred in November 2022.
The magistrate, in accepting the request joint meeting of the prosecutor and the defense of the suspectsrepresented by the lawyer Federico Conte (defender of almost all the doctors) and the lawyer Laura Ceccarelli (in defense of doctor Giuseppina Fezza), has «found and certified the regularity and professionalism of the conduct of the operators on a medical-legal level, in obedience to the rule of judgment, strengthened by Cartabia reform, that is to say the lack of a causal link between the operative intent, carried out according to science and conscience, and the patient’s death” we read in a note signed by the lawyer Conte.
The victim’s family and their lawyer Agostino Allegro opposed the prosecutor’s request for dismissal. In the note, Professor Iesu’s trusted defender also specifies that «it was the only criminal case pending in Salerno against the well-known heart surgeon who, in the meantime, unfortunately, has left the Ruggi of Aragon to take over the management of the cardiac surgery department of thePineta Grande hospital in Caserta». Together with Iesu they had ended up under investigation, and they too were acquitted of the charges, even the doctors Generoso Mastrogiovanni, Mario Colombino, Giovanni Ambrosino Di Miccio, Giuseppina Fezza.
The deceased patient had arrived at the Ruggi cardiological tower from Eboli hospital where the doctors had diagnosed her with acute aortic syndrome: intramural hematoma of the ascending aorta. Once she arrived in Salerno, the doctors found that the lady, most likely, she had been the victim of a previous heart attack had in the days prior to hospitalization. As the situation degenerated, the woman underwent surgery performed by the doctor Mastrogiovanni who, after ten hours in the operating room, reported to the family that the diagnosis from the Eboli hospital was wrong and that the patient had a thickening of the aorta on a inflammatory. The doctor said that he had nevertheless carried out the operation by replacing the aorta with a prosthesis of a smaller size than was necessary since the operation had been carried out in emergency conditions, reporting that he had also inserted a by pass.
After a few days it was Professor Iesu who reported to the family that the patient’s right ventricle was not functioning, due to post-operative complications, and thatshe would have undergone a second operation. But the woman got worse and she died. The autopsy revealed that the patient had died due to a “convergence of multiple and serious multi-organ impairments such as outbreak pneumonia which caused a series of complications”. The prosecutor’s consultants subsequently excluded the responsibility of the Eboli doctors while the “optimal execution” of the surgery on Ruggi would have made it possible to avoid the lady’s death. The doctors, therefore, according to the consultants of the Salerno prosecutor’s office, would have implemented, during the operation, “all possible measures, both pharmacological and mechanical, without obtaining the desired results”: The family consultant – writes the investigating judge – “he disagreed with the conclusions of his colleagues but did not add further points for investigation”.
So “the existence of the causal link remains doubtful between the doctors’ conduct and the patient’s death”, writes the investigating judge. In short, there would be no “technical certainty that the optimal execution of the intervention would have allowed the subsequent outcome to be avoided” therefore “there are no technical elements that can constitute profiles of professional misconduct”. Hence the acquittal from the charges.
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