The Extremadura Health Service (SES) must pay 14,000 euros to the relatives of the woman who rushed from the third floor of the San Pedro de Alcántara hospital in Cáceres and died as a result of the fall. In this way, the Administrative Litigation Court number 2 of Cáceres admits the appeal filed by the family of the deceased patient and represented by the lawyer Daniel López Vivas and condemns the Junta de Extremadura to pay 3,500 euros to each of the four relatives of the hospital patient for patrimonial liability.
As stated in the sentence to which this newspaper has had access, the court partially recognizes the responsibility of the SES in relation to the possible negligence that caused him not to have surveillance in the room at the time of rushing through a hospital window and the kinship relationship that unites them with the nephews, since the deceased did not have direct descendants and throughout the judicial process, one of the main issues has focused on demonstrating the degree of relationship that united the relatives with the deceased.
According to the judge’s brief, the proven facts occurred as of December 30, 2017. The 77-year-old patient was admitted to the hospital at 5:47 p.m. Throughout that day, after 10 p.m., the medical staff notified the family that the patient had been diagnosed with meningitis, a very contagious disease. From there, relatives were required to always have a person with her in the room. For this, she was isolated in the Neurology ward and before entering to see her, both staff and family had to wear a mask, gloves and pajamas to avoid direct contact. The judgment states that the plaintiffs attended the hospital every day and at dawn on January 3, 2018, two relatives spent the night with her but the patient was beside herself and presented hallucinations such as that “her brother was speaking to her from the window of the third floor, I saw people who had never been there or said that the bed was full of cat droppings. ”
That same night, four people tried to put her on the bed but she refused and pulled the catheter out of her urine. At 6:45 a.m. on January 3, the family members notified that they had to leave so that the patient would not be left alone, since she was in a very altered state. In that interval in which the relatives left and the corresponding nurse entered the shift, the woman rushed through the window and died.
It was the Court of Instruction number 1 of Cáceres that instructed the proceedings as it was a violent death for an alleged crime of reckless homicide but on April 24, 2019 the Provincial Court archived the procedure. Once the criminal proceedings were closed, the next of kin appealed administratively and finally filed the administrative dispute, which has upheld their appeal. Faced with this opinion, an appeal is possible in the next 15 days.
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Eddie is an Australian news reporter with over 9 years in the industry and has published on Forbes and tech crunch.